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“... I’ve only seen an advance proof) includes Lady Eccles and Anthony and Lady Violet Powell. Murray began the book when he was 16, still at Eton, and finished it a week before starting at Oxford. (Much of the work was done while teaching at a remote prep school in Scotland in the limbo between Eton and Oxford – a gap year to broaden ...”

“... This suggests a certain cutting edge to Margaret Kennedy, which is not quite apparent in Violet Powell’s biography. But it is a very sympathetic book and surely a definitive one, drawing in detail on the family archives. From Chapter 16, for example, I learned that Margaret Kennedy stopped writing, not because she didn’t feel like it, but ...”

“... has been encased in an obese 995 pages from Zachary Leader. Hilary Spurling’s Life of Anthony Powell breaks with this pattern. The longest-lived of all significant novelists of the last century, his 94 years are covered in fewer than 450 pages of text. In part, that’s because she confines the final quarter of his life to the briefest of postscripts. Yet ...”

“... I happened to read Michael Barber’s rather off-beat and amusing biography of Anthony Powell while waiting for a delayed easyJet flight from Stansted to Belfast and enduring all the usual privations of short-haul, low-cost flying: being shunted from gate to gate, and from sky-blue-upholstered departure lounge to sky-blue-upholstered departure lounge; and being jostled, and jostling, on this occasion in the very burly company of the young men and women of the Scottish Gymnastics Display Team, and an elderly couple, both in wheelchairs, and a man tattooed from neck to wrist, and possibly lower, who was working his way loudly through a large box of Quality Street ...”

“... of honour in Dancing to the Music of Time, an exhibition about the life and work of Anthony Powell. The painting is powerful but decorous. Apollo’s chariot, high in the sky, drives away the clouds of night. The daylight it brings falls only indirectly on the figures below: four dancers (representing the seasons), Time (whose lyre provides the ...”

“... be incongruous he disregarded. Cases where parallels are as close as those between Proust and Powell lend ‘the compulsion to evaluate’ he thought so generally inescapable a particular force, requiring especial care. We are dealing with two great writers, one universally, the other marginally, acknowledged as such. Yet in at least a couple of respects ...”

“... up by critics like Edmund Gosse, literary hostesses like Lady St Helier, and grandes dames like Violet Hunt, a former mistress of H.G. Wells and Ford Madox Ford. He now established himself as a prolific writer of novels, short stories and plays, and perfected his public persona: polite but cynical, with a streak of cruelty. He told a story of meeting ...”

“... He trained as a barrister. Trying to cross the Solent to the Isle of Wight in his steam yacht Violet, Billing ended up somewhere near Le Havre. In photographs this dark genius has the leanness and meticulous parting of T.S. Eliot, the milky eyes of Enoch Powell, and a monocle that is his signature affectation; the lens ...”

“... Shakespeare is Hamlet and Falstaff, Desdemona and Miranda; Dickens is Quilp and Mrs Gamp; Anthony Powell is Widmerpool; Henry James is Isabel Archer and Gilbert Osmond. The character as work of art has the closest possible relation with his creator’s projected being. He is an embodiment of all that is present in his author, but which his author – being ...”

“... her own mother the gift of healing hands’; that Emma’s mother wears lipstick called Un-shy Violet and ‘is named Kiloran after a bay on the island of Colonsay’; that the ‘laird who gets the girl in the Powell and Pressburger film I Know Where I’m Going is also Kiloran’; that Emma’s mother ‘never married ...”

“... in the Ministry of Town and Country Planning in 1945. But then in 1946 he died, at the age of 63. Violet Attlee, the prime minister’s wife, collected Mrs Jenkins and her 25-year-old son from the hospital and took them back to Downing Street for the night, which proved to be, as Campbell nicely observes, ‘the only time in his life that Roy slept in Number ...”

“... you​ miss me?’ Julian asked when I came back from a spell in London. He was eating two bars of Violet Crumble (Australia’s answer to the Crunchie). I said there’d been speculation in the press about my involvement with him, that it was quite difficult, a lot of these people I’d known for years, they were friends, and not answering emails or ...”