Anthony Powell: Dancing To The Music Of Life

Description

BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017 in The Sunday Times, Spectator, Mail on Sunday, Observer and Financial Times 'A landmark biography' The Times, Books of the Year 'One of our generation's greatest biographers' London Review of Books 'Witty, spirited, richly crowded with incident and character - a joy to read' Prospect From the author of the prize-winning Matisse The Master comes an essential biography of one of 20th century Britain's greatest literary minds Anthony Powell: the literary genius who gave us A Dance to the Music of Time, an epic twelve spectacular volume cyle of novels about twentieth century British society. This comic masterpiece teems with idiosyncratic characters, capturing Britain through war and peace in all its eccentricity. And it was inspired by the author's own life immersed in rich social intrigue - debutante balls, penniless muses, publisher feuds, summers on the French Riviera, weekend parties at country houses, and friendships with everyone from Evelyn Waugh to Graham Greene to VS Naipaul... Hilary Spurling brings all this back to vivid life, investigating the friends, relations, lovers and acquaintances, fools and savants who surrounded Anthony Powell, and who he immortalised in his magnificent literary legacy. * Discover Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time series, available in paperback and e-book from Arrow.

Reviews

[An] excellent and vivid biography... exemplary and deliciously readable * The Guardian * One of our generation's greatest biographers * London Review Bookshop * Meticulous... Where Spurling excels is in her punchy analyses of his novels and her understanding of the writer's life * The Financial Times * Spurling has triumphed...A compelling portrait of a lost Englishman * The Observer * This is a fine biography by a writer who knew Powell well, and who understands how writers think * The Spectator * Witty, spirited, richly crowded with incident and character, and a joy to read * Prospect * An accomplished biography of a great writer * Tatler * Spurling has brought him to humane and generous life * The Daily Telegraph * A sharp, graceful writer who has immersed herself in the territory... wonderfully vivid * The Mail on Sunday * 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 * 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 *

Author description

Hilary Spurling is the author of numerous biographies, including Ivy When Young: The Early Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett 1884-1919; Paul Scott: A Life; a two-volume biography of Matisse, The Unknown Matisse and Matisse the Master (also published in the abridged single-volume Matisse: The Life); and Burying the Bones. She won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize for Ivy When Young, the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for Matisse the Master, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Burying the Bones. She grew up in Bristol and studied at the University of Oxford. From 1964 to 1970 she was Theatre Critic and Literary Editor of the Spectator, and since then she has been a regular book reviewer for the Observer and the Daily Telegraph. In 2016 she won the Biographers' Club Lifetime Achievement Award.