The New York Times - Dwight Garner
…sensitive and sharply written…They're a good match. Without fawning, [Spurling] warms Powell up. She places his work in social and intellectual perspective, and briskly lays bare a life rich with friendship and incident…Spurling, writing with style and spark, pulls Powell down from his chilly pinnacle. It's a pleasure to meet him all over again.
Publishers Weekly
09/17/2018
This comprehensive authorized biography from Spurling (Matisse: A Life) chronicles in meticulous detail the life and work of English novelist Anthony Powell (1905–2000), whose masterpiece is A Dance to the Music of Time. Published in 12 volumes between 1951 and 1975, this Proustian saga surveys the follies and foibles of hundreds of mostly privileged Britons over several decades through the eyes of its self-effacing narrator, Nicholas Jenkins. Of particular interest to Dance aficionados will be the models for such characters as Kenneth Widmerpool, the cycle’s egregious striver. A keen observer of the human comedy, Powell had an “innate genius for friendship,” as noted by V.S. Naipaul, whom Powell encouraged early in his career. Powell’s detractors, most notably Auberon Waugh, dismissed him as a snob and disparaged Dance, but his far more numerous admirers knew him as a reserved, often witty man devoted to his craft. Spurling, a longtime friend of her subject, wisely chooses to cover the last, relatively uneventful 25 years of his life in a postscript. This is not the place to start for those who have never read Powell, but his many American fans will be rewarded. (Nov.)
From the Publisher
An elegant, affectionate biography.” —John Banville, The New Republic
“A shrewd, judicious biography. . . . Spurling is one of Britain’s finest biographers.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Excellent and vivid. . . . Powell emerges from this exemplary and deliciously readable account not only as a novelist of considerable significance . . . but also as a human being of great wit, impressive modesty and firm integrity. He is, as Proust was before him, the great literary chronicler of his culture in his time.” —Claire Messud, The Guardian
“[Spurling] is a superb biographer . . . and this new book is everything readers have come to expect from her. It’s thorough, judicious and gracefully written.” —The New Yorker
“A meticulous biography that deftly connects the life and work. . . . Where Spurling excels is in her punchy analyses of his novels and her understanding of the writer’s life.” —The Financial Times
“The definitive account of Anthony Powell, one of the most prominent and respected 20th-century writers. . . . Spurling is especially good at delineating Powell’s many relationships with . . . leading literary figures.” —Library Journal (Starred Review)
“In this biography, Powell gets what he deserves—a biographer of wide sympathy and human understanding, in tune with a style of manners and a way of thinking that is slowly vanishing. . . . Powell was a writer as self-doubting and as shockingly original as Beckett. It’s good to have a commentator who understands that.” —Philip Hensher, Spectator (London)
Kirkus Reviews
2018-09-02
An authorized biography of the prolific and underappreciated English writer.
Award-winning biographer and journalist Spurling (Pearl Buck in China: Journey to The Good Earth, 2010, etc.) writes early on that urbane Anthony Powell (1905-2000), whom she met when she was in her 20s, "made me his biographer long ago." Her friendship with "Tony" provided her with access to his diaries, letters, and numerous interviews. As the son of a British officer, Powell's early, itinerant years resulted in an "energetic imagination to people a sadly under-populated world from a child's point of view." Throughout his life, writes Spurling, "human behavior entranced him." He found a "community that accepted him" at Eton, but his years at Oxford were depressing: "How little I liked being" there, he said. Powell's friendship with fellow student Henry Yorke (the novelist Henry Green) led to their reading together Proust's Remembrance of Things Past and their realization that the "novel as they knew it could never be the same again." After graduating, Powell secured an apprentice publisher's job at Duckworths. "Nothing taught him more about the technical side of writing" than hours spent reading unsolicited manuscripts. He met authors and artists and attended parties, all the time observing. Spurling's account of this English publishing world is delightful. Powell decided that his first novel, Afternoon Men (1931), would be an "urban pastoral," which Spurling describes as a "dry run" for his later masterwork, A Dance to the Music of Time, a panoramic series of 12 volumes written over 25 years. As a novelist, writes the author, "his imagination remained to the end essentially pictorial." Readers will enjoy Spurling's descriptions of Powell's literary friendships with, among others, Evelyn Waugh, the Sitwells, George Orwell, Malcolm Muggeridge, and V.S. Naipaul; less so, her numerous, detailed descriptions of dinner parties.
Affectionate and intimate, this hefty biography should help Powell find new readers.
