“... you how much Cyril Connolly was paid for a weekly newspaper article in the 1960s, or for how much Anthony Burgess sold the film rights of A Clockwork Orange. The book is crammed with intriguing chunks of information. We learn that Harold Monro, who established the Poetry Bookshop shortly before the First World War, was a twice-married homosexual of Scottish ...”

“... other people are here who have no work to go to, but I do not talk to them. I have become what Anthony Powell would call an ‘afternoon man’. I do not see any ‘afternoon women’ and, in general, playing pinball is not a very good way of picking up beautiful girls. The only beautiful women I see are airbrush-painted on the backglass of the ...”

“... has come under the notice of fairly ambitious critics, such as Siegfried Sassoon, Quentin Bell and Anthony Powell. There is very little published comment on Surtees from his own day, but what there is tends to be emphatic about his fidelity to life. ‘The account of the medical worthies who first made the Handley waters famous,’ said ...”

“... had any idea that the young men in her son’s life were other than just ‘dear friends’. Yet Anthony Powell, who worked with him in the early days, writing scripts at Teddington Studios for ‘quota quickies’, reports in his memoirs that Rattigan ‘never made any particular secret of his homosexuality’ no matter whom he was talking to. The ...”

“... Above all, the huge ambition and the appearance of indolence, a very English contradiction which Anthony Powell summed up in just three words: Betjeman, he said, had a ‘whim of iron’. Indeed he did. He ended one of his columns in the Spectator: ‘Is this all a bit arch and E.V. Lucas-y and Fourth Leaderish? Yes, it is, and all the better for ...”

“... blush is over it should challenge us to think about how our tastes are made and why they change. Anthony Burgess is a 1960s sideboard of a writer. His range was improbable. He published 32 novels, composed symphonies, wrote two books on Joyce, a biography of Shakespeare and a study of the English language, as well as a large number of film scripts, most of ...”

“... he had been sent on a scholarship from Trinidad in 1950). In 1957, Naipaul was befriended by Anthony Powell, who helped set his literary career on a firm footing. After Powell’s death in 2000 at the age of 94, Naipaul was asked by the editor of an unnamed literary weekly to write about him. Naipaul notes that in ...”

“... on Mayhew. He’s not a slasher – though there is a very severe notice of the autobiographies of Anthony Powell and Peter Quennell – and he seems to enjoy being generous to other reviewers, as when he justly praises John Updike. He is full of gratitude to literary editors, commemorating Ian Hamilton’s work on the New Review in terms only this side ...”

“... yet to hear of him. In 1956, when the U and non-U silliness was at its height, Waugh learned that Anthony Powell had accepted a ‘degrading decoration’, namely a CBE. ‘I think it very WRONG,’ he wrote to Mitford, ‘that politicians should treat writers as second-grade civil servants. I trust you will stand out for CH or Dame.’ She replied that ...”

“... the Liberal cause at the Punch table. John himself had been at Eton with Alan Pryce-Jones, Anthony Powell, Eric Blair and Cyril Connolly, who, we are told, stood at the door of his room in the Sixth Form Passage asking, ‘Well, Johnny Lehmann, how are you this afternoon?’ While he was at Trinity his sister Rosamond published her first ...”

“... where simple inattention or mercenary haste must claim responsibility. And when, for instance, Anthony Powell writes a phrase like ‘standing on the landing’ you feel that it is the result of mandarin unconcern or high-handedness. Pritchett’s prose is full of these jangles – ‘Sitting behind the screen of the machine’ is a random example ...”

“... which breed because a jordan isn’t provided and they have to leak in the chimney. In his memoirs Anthony Powell – Henry Yorke’s friend both at school and Oxford – comments on his ‘deep interest in the eternal contrast between everyday life’s flatness and its intensity’. Like all his best work, Loving shows his extraordinary gift for ...”

“... whip). His opponents in the Monday Club liked to identify Heath as the original of Widmerpool – Anthony Powell disavowed the attribution. In any case, Widmerpool would never have been able to lose himself in music or sailing, or to achieve such high standards in either. Rising to wartime lieutenant-colonel, Heath certainly impressed his superiors, but ...”

“... suddenly pervaded the place. I could feel it stabbing through me. This was the CIGS. Thus Anthony Powell brilliantly evokes the dynamic personal impact of General Sir Alan Brooke in his novel The Military Philosophers. Brooke held positions of critical responsibility and as CIGS was titular head of the Army for the greater part of the Second ...”

“... win military advancement. The reputation of Punch was always curiously high in America, though as Anthony Powell, its one-time literary editor, has pointed out, British advertisers were not supposed to know the extent of its circulation over there. So it is no surprise to find that the Ohio State University Press is behind this immensely long and ...”