Anthony Powell

Anthony Powell (born in Westminster in 1905, died at his home in Somerset in 2000) was an English novelist whose name is inseparable from A Dance to the Music of Time, a sequence of twelve novels published between 1951 and 1975. It is among the longest novels in English, and it has kept Powell's reputation alive in Britain long after many of his contemporaries faded from view.

He was the son of an officer in the Welch Regiment, and his childhood was shaped by his father's postings and by the First World War, which often kept mother and son apart from his father. He went to Eton and then to Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a third-class degree. After arriving in London in 1926 he worked for the publisher Duckworth, and later he spent a brief spell as a screenwriter at Warner Bros. in Teddington. His first novel, Afternoon Men, appeared in 1931. In the Second World War he served in the army, eventually as a liaison officer dealing with foreign governments in exile, and he received several foreign decorations for the work. Once the war ended, writing became his only career. His style is wry and observant, turning a gallery of upper-class and artistic London figures into a long portrait of changing decades, with characters who reappear from one volume to the next.

His legacy rests chiefly on that twelve-volume sequence, which has remained in print without interruption and has been adapted for television and radio. Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis admired him, and some critics have compared him with Marcel Proust. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1956 and a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1988.