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 Lieutenant Colonel in the British Army. He was educated at Eton and at Balliol College, Oxford, from which he received a bachelor of arts degree in 1926. After graduation Powell entered the publishing business in London and launched his career as a writer in 1931 with the publication of Afternoon Men, featuring a hero who lacks all ambition and who drifts aimlessly through bohemian circles, finding meaning nowhere. Powell's next novels--From a View to a Death (1933), Agents and Patients (1936), and What's Become of Waring (1939)--deal with variations on the theme of prostituted talent and the will to dominate personal relationships.

Powell married Lady Violet Pakenham in 1934, the third...