Hilary Spurling

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Man of the North: 1869-1908

The Unknown Matisse

A Life of Henri Matisse: 1909-1954

Matisse the Master

The Life

Matisse

Invitation To The Dance

A Portrait of Sonia Orwell

The Girl from the Fiction Department

Anthony Powell

Penguin Shop: 3 Clothbound Classics for £33

[An] excellent and vivid biography... exemplary and deliciously readable

One of our generation's greatest biographers

Meticulous... Where Spurling excels is in her punchy analyses of his novels and her understanding of the writer's life

Spurling has triumphed...A compelling portrait of a lost Englishman

This is a fine biography by a writer who knew Powell well, and who understands how writers think

An accomplished biography of a great writer

Spurling has brought him to humane and generous life

A sharp, graceful writer who has immersed herself in the territory... wonderfully vivid

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

Anyone feeling gloomy in their early 50s, worried they've been leading rather a futile life for half a century, should read this biography

[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

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

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

Written with an elegance that does full credit to its subject

Meticulous biography. Spurling excels "in her punchy analyses of his novels and her understanding of the writer's life

Worth the wait; intimate and judicious, it doubles as an alternative history of a lost kind of Englishness

So readable... wonderfully vivid portraits of Powell's famous acquaintances

Richly and movingly enjoyable... a tapestry of Powell's contemporaries

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.

Dancing to the Music of Time

Peerless literary biographer Hilary Spurling turns her attention to Anthony Powell, an iconic figure of English letters. Equally notorious for his literary achievements and his lacerating wit, Powell famously authored the twelve-volume, twenty-five year magnum opus, A Dance to the Music of Time. This enduringly fascinating portrait of mid-20th-century Britain has never been out of print, inspiring TV and radio adaptations and elevating the author to The Times' list of fifty greatest British writers since 1945. 
 
Master novelist, well-connected socialite and keen-eyed social observer, Powell comes into focus as never before in this authoritative biography from one of our generation's greatest biographers.

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.

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. In 2016 she won the Biographers' Club Lifetime Achievement Award.

Anthony Powell

Dancing to the Music of Time

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[An] excellent and vivid biography... exemplary and deliciously readable

One of our generation's greatest biographers

Meticulous... Where Spurling excels is in her punchy analyses of his novels and her understanding of the writer's life

Spurling has triumphed...A compelling portrait of a lost Englishman

This is a fine biography by a writer who knew Powell well, and who understands how writers think

An accomplished biography of a great writer

Spurling has brought him to humane and generous life

A sharp, graceful writer who has immersed herself in the territory... wonderfully vivid

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

Anyone feeling gloomy in their early 50s, worried they've been leading rather a futile life for half a century, should read this biography

About Hilary Spurling

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