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“... An unjustly neglected author’? This was at least how Anthony Powell wrote of Jocelyn Brooke, none of whose books remained in print at the time of his death in 1966. But the neglect was to some degree remedied when, in 1981, Secker and Warburg reissued his Orchid Trilogy as a single volume, with an introduction by Powell, and it is nice to see this trilogy now reprinted as a Penguin Classic ...”

“... in Motion are in Shead; the Angus Morrison unpublished chapter made available to Shead and the Anthony Powell memoir which prefaced Shead’s book are re-quarried. And Motion never cites references – a major irritation of this biography without bibliography. Constant’s life-story is told with gusto, nevertheless. The brilliant conversationalist ...”

“... unblinking eyes at the whole thing: if Janet Adam Smith at the New Statesman wouldn’t print her, Anthony Powell at Punch would; a lull in Fleet Street somehow brought on a glut in Portland Place; and – ‘hey-ho’ – the villains in one publishing company would be succeeded by the angels at the next. Too much now is made of Stevie’s ...”

“... New Review, and the poem shows, with the kind of grim undemonstrative intelligence the novels of Anthony Powell know well how to reveal in horsey men, military men or men in bars (one of his characters called Odo Stevens writes Ewart-type poems), just how much Ewart as a poet owes to his attitude to other poets. I always try to dislike my poets, it’s ...”

“... in our infancy.’ Turning from Francis Hope’s fastidious reviews to the scrappy bombast of Anthony Burgess’s Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939* makes me wonder for a second why I’m being hesitant about knitting together Hope’s short pieces for a book. And yet, who would want to be remembered for less than his best, and how would ...”

“... with the possibility. Probably the best account of his youthful self is in the first volume of Anthony Powell’s memoirs, Infants of the Spring. ‘He was one of those individuals – a recognised genus – who seem to have been sent into the world to be talked about. Such persons satisfy a basic human need. Connolly’s behaviour, love ...”

“... Sacred Rhino of Uganda’? Thirdly, there will be a near-embargo on genealogical bullshit, Tony Powell stuff about the ancient Amises of Virginia, USA. We get a grandad with hairs sticking out of his red nose (‘how much I disliked and was repelled by him’), a grandma – ‘large, dreadful, hairy-faced’ – whom he remembers having ‘loathed and ...”

“... course the chronology won’t fit. Death comes for the Archbishop, though it is remembered by an Anthony Powell character only as the name of a lethal cocktail, is the title of a frail and delicate masterpiece by Willa Cather, that much underrated writer, which more than fifty years ago delineated the shape that North American civilisation would assume ...”

“... is rarely, if ever, mentioned in the same breath, or even the same paragraph, as such peers as Anthony Powell or Iris Murdoch. Fans such as Kingsley Amis and Anthony Burgess praise Ballard to the skies but they themselves are classified differently, as, God help us, “serious writers” in comparison.’ She won ...”

“... Arnold Bennett – the young and the old alike – H.G. Wells, Elizabeth Bowen, Olivia Manning, Anthony Powell. In his time Gerhardie was at least as potent a literary influence in England as Hemingway, and more pervasive, more part of the new metropolitan air that English authors breathed: they absorbed him as Dostoevsky and the Russian writers had ...”

“... but owing something, I believe, to certain not dissimilar contortions in the work of his friend Anthony Powell. Here he is telling us the circumstances under which he allowed to go forward an absurd requisition for flying-helmets – 30,000 for a Fleet Air Arm that probably needed about a quarter of that number. ‘It is no defence,’ he writes, ‘to ...”

“... concerns, and is active mainly within the horizon of an individual life. With Iris Murdoch or Anthony Powell – Davies’s closest equivalents among British novelists – mythic seriousness cohabits somewhat uneasily with social comedy. On the other side of the Atlantic, a mythic hero like Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King also bears the political ...”

“... project, it’s also one that stands on its own feet. An affinity with the fiction of Anthony Powell has been caught, but this is not a novel. It is not a memoir, though it eats the memoirs of others, plankton-fashion. It is a species of history – annals, perhaps. Kynaston’s far from copious political judgments are sensible and ...”

“... is fascinated with the loss his endeavours would seem to oppose. ‘There are few persons,’ Anthony Powell wrote in John Aubrey and His Friends (1948), ‘of whom it would be more true to say that they were interested in everything.’ Aubrey, born in Wiltshire, attended Trinity College, Oxford in the 1640s, but his studies were interrupted by the ...”

“... it attracted more enthusiastic reviews than any he had enjoyed in his lifetime. Seven years later, Anthony Powell published Books Do Furnish a Room, where he characterised Maclaren-Ross as the brilliant but undeniably odd writer, X. Trapnel. The speed with which the voracious ice-queen, Pamela Widmerpool, bolts from her husband to live in penury with ...”