Anthony Powell was born in 1905. After working in publishing and as a scriptwriter, he began to write for the Daily Telegraph in the mid-1930s. He served in the army during World War II and subsequently became the fiction reviewer on the TLS. Next came five years as literary editor of Punch. He was appointed a Companion of Honour in 1988. In addition to the twelve-novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell is the author of seven other novels, and four volumes of memoirs, To Keep the Ball Rolling.
Rich, complex, original, showing consummate narrative skill Times Literary Supplement I think it is now becoming clear that A Dance to the Music of Time is going to become the greatest modern novel since Ulysses. Clive James I would rather read Mr Powell than any English novelist now writing. Kingsley Amis