Anthony Powell
Anthony Powell was a British novelist, diarist, and literary critic, born in London on 21 December 1905.
Educated at Eton College and subsequently at Balliol College, Oxford, Powell moved through the formative institutions of English literary and social life that would later supply much of the texture of his fiction. He wrote in English throughout his career, working across the forms of the novel, the diary, and criticism before his death on 28 March 2000 in Frome.
The work for which Powell is most thoroughly identified is A Dance to the Music of Time, a sequence of twelve novels published between 1951 and 1975. The scale of the undertaking — spanning a quarter of a century of composition and a broad sweep of English social experience across its volumes — placed it among the more ambitious novelistic projects in postwar British literature. The sequence's extended publication history meant that Powell continued adding to it well into middle age, sustaining a single imaginative architecture across decades.
In recognition of his writing, Powell received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and was later made a Companion of Honour. These awards mark successive stages of formal acknowledgement across his career. The twelve-volume sequence A Dance to the Music of Time, with its sustained attention to English manners, social change, and the passage of time as observed across a narrator's long life, remains the fixed point around which Powell's literary identity turns.
Quotes by Anthony Powell
They made me think of long-forgotten conflicts and compromises between the imagination and the will, reason and feeling, power and sensuality; together with many more specifically personal sensations, experienced in the past, of pleasure and of pain.
A certain amount of brick-throwing might even be a good thing. There comes a moment in the career of most artists, if they are any good, when attacks on their work take a form almost more acceptable than praise. That happens at different moments in different careers.
Lady Warminster was a woman among women,’ said Mrs Erdleigh. ‘I shall never forget her gratitude when I revealed to her that Tuesday was the best day for the operation of revenge.
His turn-out was emphatically excellent, and he diffused waves of personality, strong, chilling gusts of icy air, a protective element that threatened to freeze into rigidity all who came through the door, before they could approach him nearer.
He seemed about to speak; then, as if he could not give sufficient weight to the words while we walked, he stopped and faced me.
It was, however, in keeping with the way my uncle conducted his life that he should reach his destination without knowing the name of the goal.
Lady Warminster represented to a high degree that characteristic of her own generation that everything may be said, though nothing indecorous discussed openly. Layer upon layer of wrapping, box after box revealing in the Chinese manner yet another box, must conceal all doubtful secrets; only the discipline of infinite obliquity made it lawful to examine the seamy side of life. If these mysteries were observed everything might be contemplated: however unsavoury: however unspeakable.
People think because a novel’s invented, it isn’t true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel’s invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can’t include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. His decision is binding. The biographer, even at his highest and best, can be only tentative, empirical.
I felt that, if we could avoid seeing each other for long enough, any questions of sentiment – so often deprecated by Barbara herself – could be allowed quietly to subside, and take their place in those niches of memory especially reserved for abortive emotional entanglements of that particular kind.
It was an occasion that undoubtedly did more credit to Mr. Deacon’s social adroitness than to my own, because I was still young enough to be only dimly aware that there are moments when mutual acquaintance may be allowed more wisely to pass unrecognised.