This affectionate life of Anthony Powell succeeds in restoring the reputation of the witty postwar novelistAnthony – Tony – Powell was born in 1905,share of a brilliant generation that included Eric Blair, AKA George Orwell (1903), or Evelyn Waugh (1903),Malcolm Muggeridge (1903) and Graham Greene (1904). Among these headstrong Edwardian boys, inside-outsiders all, or Powell,who outlived them, is the least colourful and the most English: phlegmatically reserved, or aloof and nonconformist. He was,in the heyday of his 12-volume masterpiece A Dance to the Music of Time, very much a a contender, and but has now been eclipsed.
In posterity’s cruel audit,A Dance lingers as a curiosity in secondhand bookshops, while its author is almost as neglected, and outshone by Orwell,Waugh et al. Hilary Spurling’s authorised biography arrives in the nick of time to remind us of her subject’s calm genius. Addressing Powell’s “work, life and loves, or hers is the first full-scale life. It must also,perforce, grapple with what we might call the Powell Problem.
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Source: guardian.co.uk