Anthony Powell

Publisher's description. A biography of the comic writer Anthony Powell, author of the million-word masterpiece A Dance to the Music of Time, from renowned British biographer Hilary Spurling. An insightful and surprising look into what drove the writer widely regarded as the English Proust. * Penguin * Richly and movingly enjoyable... a tapestry of Powell's contemporaries * The Times * So readable... wonderfully vivid portraits of Powell's famous acquaintances * The Mail on Sunday Books of the Year * Worth the wait; intimate and judicious, it doubles as an alternative history of a lost kind of Englishness * The Guardian * Meticulous biography. Spurling excels in her punchy analyses of his novels and her understanding of the writer's life * Financial Times Books of the Year * Written with an elegance that does full credit to its subject * Michael Howard * An exciting story, from its unhappy beginnings to its triumphant ending. You can't read this without your fingers itching to get at his Dance novels, whether for the first or the 15th time * Antonia Fraser * An often surprising and always brilliant picture of English upper-middle-class intellectual life in the mid-20th century: drunkards, journalists, musicians, aristocrats, hangers-on and the odd genius. I couldn't put it down * Claire Tomalin * [A] superb biography... beautifully written, meticulously tracked. Hilary Spurling shows a subtle understanding of her subject and his work. She demonstrates an almost uncanny ability to portray the huge cast of characters that floods in colourful profusion across the stage. Her identification of the originals of the characters in A Dance is masterly * The Oldie * Anyone feeling gloomy in their early 50s, worried they've been leading rather a futile life for half a century, should read this biography * Daily Mail * An accomplished biographer... her pen portraits are deft and vivid... brisk and bold in her evaluation of a character or retelling of an incident. Her comments on Powell's writing are always illuminating * The New Statesman * A sharp, graceful writer who has immersed herself in the territory... wonderfully vivid * The Mail on Sunday * Spurling has brought him to humane and generous life * The Daily Telegraph * An accomplished biography of a great writer * Tatler * This is a fine biography by a writer who knew Powell well, and who understands how writers think * The Spectator * Spurling has triumphed...A compelling portrait of a lost Englishman * The Observer * Meticulous... Where Spurling excels is in her punchy analyses of his novels and her understanding of the writer's life * The Financial Times * One of our generation's greatest biographers * London Review Bookshop * [An] excellent and vivid biography... exemplary and deliciously readable * The Guardian *