Six Scotches More 
Michael Wood
- A Writer's Notebook by Anthony Powell
Reviewers are always sternly instructed to check page proofs against finished copies of books, and I do, I will. But the proofs of Anthony Powell’s A Writer’s Notebook provide, along with numerous unimportant oddities of phrase and spelling which seem to be errors of transcription from script to voice to type to print (‘I would like to thank my wife, who read the manuscript book onto tape, and also Helen Gould, who typed it’), one lovely new alignment which ought not to be allowed simply to vanish into its own correction. It’s good to get things right, but we don’t have to rush it. Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time has 12 volumes, of which the tenth is called Books Do Furnish a Room; he wrote two further, later novels, not in the sequence, called O How the Wheel Becomes It and The Fisher King. The Powell offered to us here, in the pre-title list of his books, is the author of a nine-volume sequence of novels called A Dance to the Music of Time, and a further four-volume sequence called Books to Furnish a Room.
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Michael Wood teaches at Princeton. His most recent book is Literature and the Taste of Knowledge.
Other articles by this contributor:
At the Movies · Kurosawa
At the Movies · Michael Wood goes to see Babel
At the Movies · Marlon Brando
At the Movies · Michael Wood watches The Prestige
At the Movies · Michael Wood sees 300
What Henry didn’t do · ‘The Master’
On Edward Said · Michael Wood remembers Edward Said
At the Movies · Bertolucci’s The Conformist
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