The English author Anthony Dymoke Powell was born in London on 21 December 1905. He was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford where he met several other young writers and artists including Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green, John Betjeman, Graham Greene and Osbert Lancaster. Prior to World War II he worked in publishing and as a film-script writer, before becoming a full-time novelist and literary critic.
The Anthony Powell Society is a charity made up of members across the world particularly in the UK and North America who wish to promote interest in Powell and his work. Powell had a wide range of friends from George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh to V.S. Naipaul, Harold Pinter and Philip Larkin. Fans of Powell have similarly always been found across the political and literary spectrum : Kingsley Amis, Clive James, Tariq Ali, A.N.Wilson and Lady Pinter to name just a few. Hilary Spurling’s official biography is an invaluable guide to his life including the background to his literary masterpiece : the 12 volume sequence of novels entitled ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’. A TV film of ‘Dance’ was made by Channel 4 in 1997 and starred Simon Russell Beale in a BAFTA winning performance.
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In the more bookish areas of English middle-class society, whenever a coincidence occurs there is usually someone at hand to comment, "It's just like Anthony Powell." Often the coincidence turns out, on the shortest examination, to be unremarkable: typically, it might consist of two acquaintances from school or university running into one another after a gap of several years. But the name of Powell is invoked to give legitimacy to the event; it's rather like getting the priest to bless your car ... I don't even care for harmless, comic coincidences. I once went out to dinner and discovered that the seven other people present had all just finished reading A Dance to the Music of Time. I didn't relish this: not least because it meant that I didn't break my silence until the cheese course.
[Julian Barnes; Flaubert's Parrot]
