The English novelist Anthony Dymoke Powell (1905-2000), a distinguished writer of social comedy, is best known for his duodecalogy called A Dance to the Music of Time. Anthony Dymoke Powell was born in Westminster, London on Dec. 21, 1905, the son of a...

Although Anthony Powell produced five charming, self-contained, intermittently profound novels before World War II and has published two plays, his place as a major writer of fiction rests upon A Dance to the Music of Time, the roman-fleuve in twelve...

Despite Powell's inexhaustible interest in the highly competitive literary and artistic life of London, he has never shown the slightest desire to gain power for himself, a characteristic that helps explain the strange, almost anthropological interest with which he examines those men—of whom the power-hungry are the most obvious example—whose public image of themselves is so important to them that they subdue their whole natures to it. With this insight into the folkways of men of will,...

'Reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them' is a favourite saying of X. Trapnel's, and one perhaps specially appropriate to the work in which he figures. For one could hardly find a work of fiction which more clearly demonstrates what Trapnel himself calls 'the heresy of naturalism' than this sequence of novels in which, for the reader, the deepest satisfaction comes less from character and incident than from the structure that supports them both: a struct...

It is astonishing how an epoch can grow cold. All it takes, or so it would seem, is a sufficient number of memoirs mixed with the requisite stories and nicknames, all repeated and confused by whatever rendition is at hand. It has happened before and, undoubtedly, will happen again…. Now, in the second volume of Anthony Powell's memoirs [Messengers of Day], the cast of London in the '20s is brought forth for one more turn at the footlights, a cast wearily familiar by now: He-Evelyn and S...