Anthony Dymoke Powell (1905–2000) was an English novelist. A distinguished writer of social comedy, he is celebrated for his autobiographical and satiric 12-volume series of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time.
Born in London, Powell was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, where he met several other young writers, including Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene . Powell worked in publishing and journalism before World War II and, by 1936, had published four satirical novels, including Afternoon Men (1931) and Venusberg (1932.)
Powell served during World War II and, after the war, returned to book-reviewing. He wrote a biography of the British natural philosopher John Aubrey (1948) and began the series of light, witty, satirical novels he called A Dance to the Music of Time (12 vols., 1951–75,) starting with A Question of Upbringing (1951) and ending with Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975.) These books span 50 years of British upper-middle-class life and attitudes. An intricate and disciplined interweaving of personal relationships and an extraordinary scope and depth of vision characterize these novels.
Powell later published two novels, O, How the Wheel Becomes It! (1983) and The Fisher King (1986,) and two volumes of criticism, Miscellaneous Verdicts (1990) and Under Review (1992.) His four volumes of autobiography, To Keep the Ball Rolling, were published between 1976 and 1982 and three volumes of Journals between 1995 and 1997.
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Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.
—Anthony Powell
Topics: Crime, Aging, Age
Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don’t fulfill the promise of their early years.
—Anthony Powell
Topics: Parents
Self-love seems so often unrequited.
—Anthony Powell
Topics: Confidence
Few persons who have ever sat for a portrait can have felt anything but inferior while the process is going on.
—Anthony Powell
Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled by them and lumbering gloomily down vistas of triteness. With a sort of heavy-fisted dexterity the mutually adapted emotions of each of them became synchronized, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand.
—Anthony Powell
Topics: Seduction
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