Hilary Spurling

anthony-powell

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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

[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

Witty, spirited, richly crowded with incident and character, and a joy to read

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

'A landmark biography' The Times, Books of the Year 
 
The long-awaited portrait of a literary master from one of our generation's greatest biographers 
 
Anthony Powell: the literary genius who gave us A Dance to the Music of Time, an undisputed classic of English literature. Spanning twelve spectacular volumes and written over twenty-five years, his comic masterpiece teems with idiosyncratic characters, capturing twentieth century Britain through war and peace. 
 
Drawing on Powell's letters and journals, and the memories of those who knew him, Hilary Spurling explores his life. Investigating the friends, relations, lovers, acquaintances, fools and geniuses who surrounded him, she reveals the comical and tragic events that inspired one of the greatest fictions of the age. 
 
* 
 
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. She grew up in Bristol and studied at the University of Oxford. From 1964 to 1970 she was Theatre Critic and Literary Editor of the Spectator, and since then she has been a regular book reviewer for the Observer and the Daily Telegraph. In 2016 she won the Biographers' Club Lifetime Achievement Award. 
 
* 
 
Discover Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time series, available in paperback and e-book from Arrow.

Acclaimed 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.

Anthony Powell

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