Anthony powell

Friday

Antonia Fraser

The time I danced with Lyndon B. Johnson

There is general excitement among the legions of fans of A Dance to the Music of Time: next week a plaque to Anthony Powell will be placed on 1 Chester Gate, the London house where he started to write the many-volumed work of genius. I have a particular interest in attending, not only because Powell was married to my father’s sister Violet, but also because I took advantage of the relationship to lodge for several years in Chester Gate. This was when my parents chose to live maddeningly in Hampstead Garden Suburb and at the age of about seventeen I was beginning to go to parties. Go to them? But how to return? That was the problem. No taxi would go so far. I batted my eyes in vain. Fortunately, Violet was one of the kindest and most tolerant people I have ever encountered.

Johnson

Monday

Philip Hensher

Anthony Powell gets the superb new biography he deserves

Great novelists come in all shapes and sizes, but one thing they all share is a status of half-belonging. If they had no foot in the world at all, they could hardly understand it; if they completely belonged, they could hardly understand what was distinctive. One of the pleasures of this excellent biography is fully appreciating the peculiar, liminal, not-quite-successful position Powell wrote from, and described with great exactness. In half a dozen social and professional milieux, he was a tolerated, perhaps useful minor presence, like a spare man at dinner. From the standpoint of a rather failed editor, screenwriter, soldier, socialite, he stood by and watched the world. In each case, one suspects, the subjects hardly realized they were being observed.

anthony powell