Anthony Powell

The first full-length biography of Anthony Powell, publisher, journalist, man-about-town, and author of the Dance to the Music of Time sequence now available in paperback. In the first full-length biography of Anthony Powell, publisher, journalist, man-about-town, and author of the Dance to the Music of Time sequence, Michael Barber takes a close look at the man and the writer. He finds someone whose temperament was often at war with his upbringing. The son of an army officer, educated at Eton and Balliol, Powell chose as his closest friends people like Malcolm Muggeridge and the composer, Constant Lambert, who were not out of the top drawer or the one below it. And although happily married for over sixty years to Lady Violet Pakenham, the daughter of an Earl, he admitted that he had 'always been attracted by girls who looked as if they'd slept under a bush for a week.' Powell believed that creative writing was, like alchemy, a mysterious, indefinable process by which experience became art. Michael Barber focuses on the experience that provided Powell with his raw material. He pays particular attention to the 'entre-deux-guerres', that sharply divided cultural interlude when the artists and good-timers with whom Powell identified in the twenties were followed, in the thirties, by the politicians and the prigs. Amusing, candid, and highly entertaining, this is a delightfully readable account of one of the most humorous writers of the twentieth century.

About the Author :
Michael Barber is a writer and broadcaster whose previous biography, The Captain, was described by A.N.Wilson as 'a minor masterpiece' and by Frederic Raphael as 'hugely entertaining and scrumptiously readable'. He conducted 'The Paris Review' interview with Anthony Powell and has written Powell's entry for the New DNB. Married with a son, a stepson and a stepdaughter, Michael Barber lives near Wimbledon Common.

Review :
[Barber] has done a remarkably good job... This study of Powell is very readable... I have read it twice with immense enjoyment. Barber deals with Powell's own life story in an admirably straightforward and unsentimental manner... [He] grasps the essential point about Powell's novels... He writes perceptibly about such friends as Constant Lambert, Adrian Dantry, George Orwell and Malcolm Muggeridge' - Hugh Massingberd, Spectator 'Barber takes the trouble to build up the secondary characters; essential in this case, not only because many of them are a good deal more colourful and entertaining than the main subject of the book, but because Powell liked to see himself as observer, noting from the wings the absurdities and aberrations of his friends in bohemia and high society, and transmogrifying them into the characters in his books... Barber covers all this with admirable panache, interlacing Powell's own life with those of his friends... what comes across strongly from Baber's biography is [Powell's] genuine interest in the variety and oddity of human nature. Whether he managed to convey this in the pages of Dance is another matter, but reading Michael Barber's version of events almost persuades me that he did' - Jeremy Lewis, Literary Review '[Barber's] textual analysis of the Powell novels, for the origins of people and scenes, is especially pleasing... Powell's novels deserve to survive in the second rank of English 20th-Century fiction, and this biography provides a most entertaining side dish for his fans' - Max Hastings, Sunday Telegraph 'Admirably frank... Barber's Powell is not so much a creature of fact or fiction but a hybrid of the two' - Hilary Spurling, Daily Telegraph '[Barber] is ideally suited to write Powell's life... his sense of humour is just as ponderous' - John Carey, Sunday Times 'Michael Barber has made a spirited attempt to breeze his way through Powell's life. Snippets from the Muggeridge diaries, both published and unpublished are the best things in this book. They make one hope that someone will one day edit a much fuller edition. One can recommend this book... as an unpretentious romp through the story of Evelyn Waugh, Malcolm Muggeridge, George Orwell and Weidenfield, Peter Quennell, Cyril Connolly and all.' - A.N Wilson, Times Literary Supplement 'Barber is at his best describing bohemia and the literary world that Powell by choice inhabited - once again very far from the aristocratic one of the gossip-writers imagination' - Antonia Fraser, Evening Standard