Anthony Powell

Anthony Powell

Dancing to the Music of Time

Summary

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

About the author

Hilary Spurling

Hilary Spurling won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for The Early Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett 1884-1919, and the Duff Cooper Prize and Heinemann Award for Secrets of a Woman's Heart: The Later Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett 1920-1969. She is also the author of Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book, Paper Spirits and The Girl from the Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell. She has been Arts and Literary Editor of the Spectator, and a regular reviewer for the Observer, the New York Times and the Daily Telegraph.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more