“... 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 ...”

“... career, providing introductions and removing any pressing need to earn money, were attributed by Anthony Powell, somewhat sourly, to Wood’s ‘convenient bisexuality’. Ingleby, too, subscribes to this judgment, but it seems unfair. Confused, perhaps, about his sexuality, as he was about many things, Wood was sincere in his love of glamour and of ...”

“... of a sacred monster. Although Carpenter skilfully weaves the friends – Connolly, Betjeman, Anthony Powell, Brian Howard, Robert Byron – into a completed composition, the others serve chiefly to start a scene or two and swell the progress of Waugh himself. Of course this gives a misleading picture of period and individuals, but that is in a sense ...”

“... of himself sits oddly with a rather stiffly elevated prose style – a strange combination of Anthony Powell and the ‘aforesaid’ and ‘as has been noted’ of the legal brief – and if one were to be searching for a clue to the author’s true self-valuation, one might start by looking at his syntax rather than at any of his stated sins. A ...”

“... character to the majority of those who know about him,’ and in the succeeding sentence cites Anthony Powell as declaring: ‘I can’t imagine anyone more odiously bad mannered and charmless.’ But Mr Powell’s impression turns out to have been formed in 1928, when, scarcely down from Oxford and working in a ...”

“... a number of books, contracts a number of marriages and meets just about everyone worth meeting. Anthony Powell and Henry Green are his contemporaries at Oxford; he takes tea with Ottoline Morrell and twits Virginia Woolf. Cyril Connolly and Evelyn Waugh are London acquaintances. Picasso sketches his portrait, Hemingway is a fellow war ...”

“... writers he thought she might admire (Larkin, Isaiah Berlin, V.S. Pritchett, Mario Vargas Llosa and Anthony Powell, among others), which Larkin had found tough going. ‘The Thatcher dinner was pretty grisly. Even now I shudder and moan involuntarily. M says: “Is it death again, or Mrs Thatcher?”’ At the start of the decade, he’d written to ...”

“... Barker’s role was not unlike that of X. Trapnel, the memorable bohemian literary ego invented by Anthony Powell in A Dance to the Music of Time. When Powell came to recreate that bygone literary world in his roman fleuve he could no doubt recall many Barkers about. When the eldest daughter Georgina asked why her ...”

“... world. In his time he was a genuine odd man out, rather in the sense in which his admirers, Anthony Powell and Angus Wilson, were to be in theirs. At this distance we can see how dependent on a faith most of the ‘black’ novels of the Thirties – whether by comedians like Waugh or gloom merchants like Greene and Mauriac – really were. Both ...”

“... present in his son-in-law Barry Humphries’s autobiography. Both are interested in themselves (Anthony Powell remarks in his memoirs that to be interested in oneself, as opposed to being merely egocentric, is one of the rarest of gifts) but neither takes himself very seriously. So little is Humphries concerned to present an image – the worst thing ...”

“... to read the letters (or many of them) that Amis received: several hundred from Robert Conquest, Anthony Powell, John Betjeman, Philip Larkin and others. These letters help supply the answers to niggling editorial puzzles: for example, the identity of ‘Bluebell’ (Conquest’s dog), or ‘engine driver Hunt’, from a passage in a letter reading ...”

“... relief was available from schoolfellows such as Louis MacNeice, T.C. Worsley, Ellis Waterhouse and Anthony Blunt. The school magazine printed his poems, he played Puck, and Maria in Twelfth Night; he had love affairs, and was recognised as an aesthete. The best evidence of aestheticism was his refusal, when the postage was reduced from 2½d to 2d in 1924, to ...”

“... yet we may still have a sneaking feeling that the truest word on the subject for most people was Anthony Powell’s in A Dance to the Music of Time, where the narrator re-encounters an old flame and finds it barely credible that he could have ever had a physical or any other kind of relationship with her. Stanley and the Women continued what had become ...”

“... life have its messiness, and let the book pay the necessary price in terms of formal imperfection. Anthony Powell’s four-volume memoirs, published from 1976 to 1982, are something of a masterpiece in this mode, combining a deceptive casualness of manner with an almost epigrammatical density of insight. Its pen portraits are, in an unassuming ...”

“... the reality was another matter. He knew that his real home had been the condemned playground. Anthony Powell comments on the odd fact that Connolly’s chosen and not uncherished home in later years was not some castle in Spain or a Dordogne farmhouse but a bald redbrick villa in an Eastbourne street, well away from the sea but not so far from his ...”