Powell, Anthony 1905–2000

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Powell, Anthony 1905–2000

(Mark Members, Anthony Dymoke Powell)

PERSONAL: Surname rhymes with "Noel"; born December 21, 1905, in London, England; died March 28, 2000, in Somerset, England; son of Philip Lionel William (an army officer) and Maude Mary (Wells-Dymoke) Powell; married Lady Violet Pakenham (daughter of fifth Earl of Longford), December 1, 1934; children: Tristram, John. Education: Balliol College, Oxford, B.A., 1926, M.A., 1944.

CAREER: Writer, 1930–. Affiliated with Duckworth Co., Ltd. (publishing house), London, England, 1926–35; Warner Brothers of Great Britain, scriptwriter, 1936. Trustee of National Portrait Gallery, London, England, 1962–76. Military service: Welch Regiment, Infantry, 1939–41, Intelligence Corps, 1941–45; served as liaison officer at War Office; became major; received Order of the White Lion (Czechoslovakia), Order of Leopold II (Belgium), Oaken Crown and Croix de Guerre (both Luxembourg).

AWARDS, HONORS: Named Commander of Order of the British Empire, 1956; James Tait Black Memorial Prize, 1958, for At Lady Molly's; W.H. Smith Fiction Award, 1974, for Temporary Kings; Bennett Award, Hudson Review, and T.S. Eliot Award, Ingersoll Foundation, both 1984, both for body of work; named Companion of Honor, 1988. D.Litt., University of Sussex, 1971, University of Leicester and University of Kent, 1976, Oxford University, 1980, and Bristol University, 1982.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Afternoon Men, Duckworth (London, England), 1931, Holt (New York, NY), 1932.

Venusberg (also see below), Duckworth (London, England), 1932, Popular Library (New York, NY), 1978.

From a View to a Death, Duckworth (London, England), 1933, published as Mr. Zouch, Superman: From a View to a Death, Vanguard (New York, NY), 1934.

Agents and Patients (also see below), Duckworth (London, England), 1936, Popular Library (New York, NY), 1978.

What's Become of Waring?, Cassell (London, England), 1939, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1963.

Two Novels: Venusberg [and] Agents and Patients, Periscope-Holliday (New York, NY), 1952.

(Under pseudonym Mark Members) Iron Aspidistra, Sycamore Press, 1985.

The Fisher King, Norton (New York, NY), 1986.

"A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME" SERIES; NOVELS

A Question of Upbringing, Scribner (New York, NY), 1951.

A Buyer's Market, Heinemann (London, England), 1952, Scribner (New York, NY), 1953.

The Acceptance World, Heinemann (London, England), 1955, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1956.

At Lady Molly's, Heinemann (London, England), 1957, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1958.

Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1960.

The Kindly Ones, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1962.

The Valley of Bones, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1964.

The Soldier's Art, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1966.

The Military Philosophers, Heinemann (London, England), 1968, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1969.

Books Do Furnish a Room, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1971.

Temporary Kings, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1973.

Hearing Secret Harmonies, Heinemann (London, England), 1975, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1976.

"A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME" OMNIBUS VOLUMES

A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement (contains A Question of Upbringing, A Buyer's Market, and The Acceptance World), Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1963.

A Dance to the Music of Time: Second Movement (contains At Lady Molly's, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, and The Kindly Ones), Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1964.

A Dance to the Music of Time: Third Movement (contains The Valley of Bones, The Soldier's Art, and The Military Philosophers), Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1971.

A Dance to the Music of Time: Fourth Movement (contains Books Do Furnish a Room, Temporary Kings, and Hearing Secret Harmonies), Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1976.

The Album of Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, edited by Violet Powell, Thames and Hudson (London, England), 1987.

A Dance to the Music of Time (complete collection), University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1995.

OTHER

(Editor) Barnard Letters, 1778–1884, Duckworth (London, England), 1928.

Caledonia: A Fragment (poems), privately printed, 1934.

(Editor and author of introduction) Novels of High Society from the Victorian Age, Pilot Press (London, England), 1947.

John Aubrey and His Friends, Scribner (New York, NY), 1948, revised edition, Barnes and Noble (New York, NY), 1963.

(Editor and author of introduction) John Aubrey, Brief Lives and Other Selected Writings, Scribner (New York, NY), 1949.

Two Plays: The Garden God [and] The Rest I'll Whistle, Heinemann (London, England), 1971, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1972.

To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell, Volume 1: Infants of the Spring, Heinemann (London, England), 1976, published as Infants of the Spring: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell, Holt (New York, NY), 1977, Volume 2: Messengers of Day, Holt (New York, NY), 1978, Volume 3: Faces in My Time, Heinemann (London, England), 1980, Holt (New York, NY), 1981, Volume 4: The Strangers Are All Gone, Heinemann (London, England), 1982, Holt (New York, NY), 1983, abridged edition of all four volumes published as To Keep the Ball Rolling, foreword by Ferdinand Mount, Penguin (Harmondsworth, Sussex, England), 1983, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2001.

O, How the Wheel Becomes It! (novella), Holt (New York, NY), 1983.

Miscellaneous Verdicts: Writings on Writers, 1946–1989, Heinemann (London, England), 1990, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1992.

Under Review: Further Writings on Writers, 1946–1990, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1994.

Journals 1982–1986, Heinemann (London, England), 1995.

Journals 1987–1989, Heinemann (London, England), 1996.

Journals 1990–1992, Heinemann (London, England), 1997.

A Writer's Notebook, Heinemann (London, England), 2000.

Contributor to books, including Burke's Landed Gentry, Burke's Peerage Publications, 1965, and Constant Lambert by Richard Shead, Simon Publications, 1973. Author of introduction to Raffles by E.W. Hornung, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1950, and The Orchid Trilogy by Jocelyn Brooke, Secker & Warburg, 1981. Author of preface to The Complete Ronald Firbank, Duckworth, 1961.

ADAPTATIONS: A Dance to the Music of Time was adapted for television by Hugh Whitemore and appeared on Britain's Channel 4, 1997. Several recordings of A Dance to the Music of Time have been produced, including a twenty-four audio cassette version read by Simon Callow, Hodder Headline Audiobooks, 1997, and a sixty-five audio cassette version read by David Case, Books on Tape. Simon Russell Beale also read for Dance to the Music of Time: Question of Upbringing and Dance to the Music of Time: Buyer's Market, both for Cover to Cover Cassettes.

SIDELIGHTS: Novelist Anthony Powell spent more than forty years chronicling the changing fortunes of Great Britain's upper class in the twentieth century. He is best known for his twelve-volume series A Dance to the Music of Time, the longest fictional work in the English language. Published in installments over almost twenty-five years, A Dance to the Music of Time follows a number of characters from adolescence in 1914 to old age and death in the late 1960s. New Yorker critic Naomi Bliven called the series "one of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War," and New Republic reviewer C. David Benson described the novels as "the most sophisticated chronicle of modern life we have." In the Toronto Globe and Mail, Douglas Hill observed that Powell "has had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time and among the right people, and to be able to watch all this passing scene and transform the most apparently insignificant moments into the fabric of his fiction."

Newsweek correspondent Gene Lyons found Powell "entirely provincial, yet not at all a snob … an aristocratic man of letters in the best British tradition." Lyons continued, "He is a contemporary of that extraordinary group of English writers who were born during the first decade of this century." Indeed, Powell enjoyed close friendships with Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, and George Orwell, and he knew numerous other important writers, including Dylan Thomas and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Powell grew up in comfortable circumstances—he was descended from nobility—and was educated at Eton and Oxford. As Benson noted, however, the author's entire generation "was marked by having experienced the extinction of the privileged England of their childhoods which was replaced by a completely different post-war world." In his fiction Powell explores the extinction, or rather the metamorphosis, of the British upper class.

Powell graduated from Oxford in 1926 and took a job with Duckworth, a major publishing house in London. While he served as an editor at Duckworth, Powell began to write fiction of his own; eventually, Duckworth published four of his five early novels. Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor James Tucker described Powell's first few books as "entertaining, light, but not lightweight." Tucker also observed that in his early works Powell "appears to be interested in societies under threat, either from their own languor and foolishness or from huge political reverses or from calculated infiltration by arrivistes." Powell's first novel, Afternoon Men, has become his best-known prewar work. A satire of the upper-middle-class penchant for aimlessness, Afternoon Men begins and ends with party invitations. Tucker observed that, in the novel, Powell "expertly depicts the banality of the lives under scrutiny by having characters talk with a remorseless, plodding simplicity, as if half-baked, half-drunk, or half-asleep after too many nights on the town."

Even though Powell's first five novels sold only several thousand copies apiece, by the 1930s the author "had come to be recognized as one of several significant novelists who had emerged in Britain since World War I," Tucker related. Like most Englishmen his age, however, Powell's career was interrupted when World War II began. He enlisted in the Welsh Regiment and then served four years with the Intelligence Corps as liaison to the War Office. When the war ended, Powell still did not return to fiction for some time. Instead, he wrote a comprehensive biography of John Aubrey, a seventeenth-century writer and antiquary of Welsh descent. Only when John Aubrey and His Friends was completed did Powell return to fiction—but he did so in a grand way. Tucker reported, "Believing that many authors went on producing what were virtually the same characters in book after book, though with different names and in fresh circumstances, [Powell] wanted to break out from the confines of the 80,000-word novel. The roman-fleuve would allow him to recognize the problem openly and continue with established characters through successive volumes. During the late 1940s, while visiting the Wallace Collection in London, he saw Nicolas Poussin's painting A Dance to the Music of Time and felt he had at last found the theme and title of his work."

The Poussin painting depicts the four seasons as buxom young maidens, dancing under a threatening sky to music provided by a wizened, bearded man—Father Time. Powell's work, too, involves "dancers," a coterie of interrelated men and women living in modern Britain, whose lives intersect on the whims of fate. As Tucker noted, "scores of major characters dance their way in and out of one another's lives—and especially one another's beds—often in seemingly random style; yet when the whole sequence is seen together there is some sort of order. To put it more strongly than that would be wrong; but music and dance do imply a system, harmony, pattern."

In an essay for South Atlantic Quarterly, Kerry Mc-Sweeney remarked that A Dance to the Music of Time deals with "a densely populated swath of upper-class, upper-middle-class, artistic, and Bohemian life in England from the twenties to the seventies. The vehicle of presentation is the comedy of manners. Attention is consistently focused on the nuances of social behavior, the idiosyncracies of personal style, and the intricacies of sexual preference. All of the characters in the series … are seen strictly from the outside—that is, in terms of how they choose to present themselves to the world." In the early volumes, the characters leave school to establish careers which are often less important than the whirl of social obligations. The middle volumes concern the years of the Second World War, and the later volumes send many of the characters to their deaths. In The Situation of the Novel, Bernard Bergonzi called A Dance to the Music of Time "a great work of social comedy in a central English tradition" that "also conveys the cumulative sense of a shabby and dispirited society." A Washington Post Book World reviewer found the series "an addictive social fantasy, strictly controlled by the author's sense of the ambiguity of human relationships and an indispensable literary style." Contemporary Novelists contributor Robert K. Morris described it as "a panoramic sequence of extraordinary scope and complexity. A work that has never relinquished its surface brilliance at portraying the insular, private, self-contained, snobbish world of the British middle and upper classes, has more latterly become a vast canvas of English life between the wars and afterwards, and in the profoundest way no less than a comic epic on time, history, and change."

The action in A Dance to the Music of Time is revealed by Nicholas Jenkins, a nonparticipant observer who is happily married, urbane, and loyal to his values. From his vantage point in society, Jenkins describes the ascent of several power-hungry men—chief among them Kenneth Widmerpool—who become consumed by the perfection of their public images. "Widmerpool becomes the perfect foil for Nick Jenkins's emergent decency, dignity, and probity," Morris related. Bliven thought the series "subtly but ever more insistently contrasts the quest for power with the urge to create. The power seekers are killers and lovers of death, and the defenses against them are disinterestedness, playfulness, and, above all, artistic dedication." Tucker saw the tension between Jenkins and Widmerpool as "the difference between a man who is nothing but ambition, a sort of burlesque Faust, and another who represents enduring standards of humaneness, creativity, and artistic appreciation in a shoddy world." Salon.com writer John Perry commented, "So many disagreeable qualities converge in the person of Kenneth Widmerpool, lesser hands would have made him a buffoon. But Powell never dismisses him…. Powell clearly shows his virtues, his ambition and toughness—admired by his colleagues even when they hate him."

A Dance to the Music of Time does not provide a continuous narrative; rather, it presents a series of minutely observed vignettes, described with an understated prose. "What strikes one first about [the series]," Tucker wrote in The Novels of Anthony Powell, "is its elaborate texture and seemingly cast-iron poise, qualities suiting the narrator's wisdom, favoured status, knowledge and assurance…. The prose is largely appositional: to borrow the mode, plain statement followed by commentary or modification or conjecture, so that the reader feels himself presented with a very wide choice of possible responses; the uncertainties of real life are caught…. This modulated dignity, mandarin with the skids under it, gives Powell's style its distinction." In the New York Review of Books, Michael Wood commented that the most "persistent pleasure" to be gained from Powell's masterwork "is that of having your expectations skillfully and elegantly cheated: the musician plays a strange chord, or an old chord you haven't heard for a long time, even a wrong note now and then."

Lyons observed that A Dance to the Music of Time provides a remarkable steadfastness of vision—"the novel's closing pages, written 25 years after the opening, make so perfect a fit they might have been the product of a single morning's work." Similarly, Stephen J. Tapscott related in Texas Quarterly that "for all its diversity of character, sequence, and history, Powell's Dance is a remarkably integral work." Perry thought Powell's "rare sense of balance and dignity allow him to manipulate a cast of 500 through seven decades, creating a web of shifting relationships impossible in any 'factual' literary form—and a 20th century social history, more rigorous, multilayered and infinitely more entertaining than any academic publication."

Powell's series has found numerous champions in both Great Britain and the United States. Chicago Tribune Books reviewer Larry Kart called A Dance to the Music of Time the "century's finest English-language work of fiction." In The Sense of Life in the Modern Novel, Arthur Mizener wrote that the effect of the work "is a very remarkable one for the mid-twentieth century. It is as if we had come suddenly on an enormously intelligent but completely undogmatic mind with a vision of experience that is deeply penetrating and yet wholly recognizable, beautifully subtle in ordination and yet quite unostentatious in technique, and in every respect undistorted by doctrine." Commonweal contributor Arnold Beichman praised Powell's novels for their "great cosmic sadness about our lives," adding: "It is Powell's skill and power in depicting man's helplessness that makes [his] novels so unforgettable, so wonderfully sad." Speaking to the universality of A Dance to the Music of Time, National Review correspondent Anthony Lejeune concluded that Powell "makes us see not only his world, but ours, through his eyes. Not only his characters, but our own lives and the lives which are constantly weaving and unweaving themselves around us, become part of the pattern, part of the inexplicable dance."

After completing A Dance to the Music of Time, Powell remained active, producing a four-volume memoir, journals and other nonfiction works, a novella titled O, How the Wheel Becomes It!, and a novel, The Fisher King. The Fisher King involves passengers on an educational cruise around the British Isles, particularly the character Saul Henchman, a renowned photographer and emasculated veteran of World War II who loses the devotion of his beautiful companion, Barberina Rook-wood, to another passenger. Powell incorporates significant mythical allusions—Henchman represents the impotent "Fisher King" of Arthurian legend, and the cruise ship is named "Alecto" after one of the Furies from Greek mythology. A departure from his "stylized" and "basically realistic" narrative of A Dance to the Music of Time, The Fisher King "gives us a fresh chance to savor Mr. Powell's irony and urbanity, and his dexterous turns of phrase," commented New York Times reviewer John Gross. According to John Bayley, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, "The Fisher King is a rare work of art for a number of reasons, not least because of the skill and economy with which it makes an absorbing narrative out of the simplest daily materials—gossip, vanity, curiosity, the routine ways in which consciousness works on the situations that intrigue it." New York Times Book Review contributor John Espey observed that "Mr. Powell remains the master storyteller, ever quick to catch the conscience of the king, not to mention that of his reader."

Powell also produced several collections of criticism. Miscellaneous Verdicts: Writings on Writers, 1946–1989 is an assemblage of Powell's literary reviews, divided into four sections that offer appraisal of classic English writers, Marcel Proust, Powell's contemporaries, and American writers. "Powell, like all his literary friends, reviewed constantly," related Washington Post Book World reviewer Daniel Max. "And although he does not make any claim to have particularly enjoyed it or having gotten much more on paper than the sort of comments that people find useful in deciding whether to buy a book or not, he has the innate respect for any professional, competent job done without complaint." Though some critics viewed Powell's analysis as uninspired and relatively conservative, Anthony Burgess remarked in an Observer review, "This is an urbane book, quietly erudite, very sensible, highly civilized, remarkably useful."

Under Review: Further Writings on Writers, 1946–1990 is another collection of Powell's literary journalism dealing with British, Irish, and Continental writers, passing over their American counterparts altogether. This collection, more biographical than critical, includes portraits of a wide range of authors in four sections titled "The Nineties," "Bloomsbury and Non-Blooms-bury," "Some Novels and Novelists," and "The Europeans"—the latter section featuring Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, among others. According to Chicago Tribune Books reviewer Merle Rubin, "Powell also happens to be a model book reviewer: an elegantly understated critic more inclined to err on the side of kindness than of severity. Straightforward, focused, seldom if ever using a review as an excuse to sound off on pet topics, demonstrate his superiority to the book's author or write up a storm of showy prose, he is not only erudite but also genuinely wise—the kind of passionate, informed and discriminating reader that other writers dream of."

In The Novels of Anthony Powell, James Tucker suggested that one feels "a plea throughout Powell's books for the natural warmth and vitality of life to be allowed their expression…. The distinction of Powell's novels is that they engagingly look at surfaces and, at the same time, suggest that this is by no means enough. They will continually disturb the surface to show us much more. In their quiet way they direct us towards a good, practical, unextreme general philosophy of life." Voice Literary Supplement contributor Ann Snitow observed that Powell can be recommended "for his long, honorable battle with language, his unavoidable anxieties, his preference for kindness over gaudier virtues. If he's brittle, it's because he knows things break; he's never complacent in either his playfulness or his hauteur." Snitow concluded, "Powell's a writer who values humility—antique word—a virtue now so necessary, and even more rare and obscure, perhaps, than Powell himself."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Allen, Walter, The Modern Novel, Dutton (New York, NY), 1965.

Bergonzi, Bernard, The Situation of the Novel, University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 1970.

Bergonzi, Bernard, Anthony Powell, Longman (London, England), 1971.

Brennan, Neil Francis, Anthony Powell, Prentice Hall (New York, NY), 1995.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 1, 1973, Volume 3, 1975, Volume 7, 1977, Volume 9, 1978, Volume 10, 1979, Volume 31, 1985.

Contemporary Novelists, sixth edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996, pp. 816-819.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 15: British Novelists, 1930–1959, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1983.

Encyclopedia of World Biography, second edition, Volume 12, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998, pp. 422-423.

Encyclopedia of World Literature in the Twentieth Century, third edition, Volume 3, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999, pp. 587-591.

Felber, Lynette, Gender and Genre in Novels without End, University Press of Florida (Gainesville, FL), 1996.

Gorra, Michael Edward, The English Novel at Mid-Century: From the Leaning Tower, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1990.

Hall, James, The Tragic Comedians, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1963.

Joyau, Isabelle, Investigating Powell's "A Dance to the Music of Time," St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1994.

Karl, Frederick R., A Reader's Guide to the Contemporary English Novel, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1962.

Lilley, George P., Anthony Powell, A Bibliography, Oak Knoll (New Castle, DE), 1993.

McEwan, Neil, Anthony Powell, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1991.

Mizener, Arthur, The Sense of Life in the Modern Novel, Houghton (Boston, MA), 1964.

Modern British Literature, second edition, Volume 3, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2000, pp. 23-32.

Morris, Robert K., The Novels of Anthony Powell, University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 1968.

Ries, Lawrence R., Wolf Masks: Violence in Contemporary Poetry, Kennikat (Port Washington, NY), 1977.

Russell, John D., Anthony Powell, A Quintet, Sextet and War, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1970.

Selig, Robert L., Time and Anthony Powell: A Critical Study, Associated University Presses (Cranbury, NJ), 1991.

Shapiro, Charles, Contemporary British Novelists, Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, IL), 1965.

Spurling, Hilary, Invitation to the Dance: A Guide to Anthony Powell's "Dance to the Music of Time," Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1978.

Symons, Julian, Critical Occasions, Hamish Hamilton (London, England), 1966.

Tucker, James, The Novels of Anthony Powell, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1976.

PERIODICALS

American Scholar, autumn, 1993, Alan Rutenberg, review of Miscellaneous Verdicts: Writings on Writers, 1946–1989, p. 619.

Atlantic Monthly, March, 1962; January, 1996, Barbara Wallraff, review of A Dance to the Music of Time, pp. 108-111; June, 2001, Christopher Hitchens, review of To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell, pp. 94-99.

Best Sellers, March 15, 1969.

Booklist, May 15, 2000, Bill Ott, review of A Dance to the Music of Time, p. 1792.

Books and Bookmen, April, 1971; March, 1976; January, 1977.

Book Week, April 9, 1967.

Chicago Tribune Book World, July 19, 1981, Larry Kart, review of A Dance to the Music of Time.

Christian Science Monitor, October 6, 1960; January 25, 1967; March 16, 1967; March 9, 1981, Maggie Lewis, review of Faces in My Time, section B, p. 3.

Commonweal, July 31, 1959; May 12, 1967; May 30, 1969; May 5, 2000, Edward T. Wheeler, review of A Dance to the Music of Time, p. 31.

Contemporary Literature, spring, 1976.

Critique, spring, 1964.

Economist, February 18, 1995, review of Journals 1982–1986, p. 89.

Encounter, February, 1976.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), March 31, 1984, Douglas Hill.

Hudson Review, summer, 1967; spring, 1976; winter, 1981–82; autumn, 1984.

Kenyon Review, winter, 1960.

Listener, October 14, 1968; September 11, 1975; May 11, 1978.

London Magazine, January, 1969.

London Review of Books, May 18, 1983; February 8, 2001, Michael Wood, "Six Scotches More," pp. 14-16.

Los Angeles Times, March 30, 2000, p. A26.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 22, 1983, Michael F. Harper, review of The Strangers Are All Gone, p. 4; November 6, 1983, Richard Eder, review of O, How the Wheel Becomes It!, p. 1; April 17, 1986, John Bayley, review of The Fisher King, p. 16.

Nation, May 29, 1967; December 10, 1973; June 19, 1976.

National Review, December 7, 1973; June 11, 1976; January 11, 1985, John R. Coyne, "Kirk and Powell: The Ingersoll Prizes," p. 42.

New Criterion, May, 2001, Ben Downing, review of To Keep the Ball Rolling, p. 70.

New Leader, November 26, 1973.

New Republic, September 24, 1962; April 22, 1967; October 27, 1973; June 11, 1977; February 27, 1984, David Heim, review of O, How the Wheel Becomes It!, pp. 39-40; August 19, 1996, William H. Pritchard, review of A Dance to the Music of Time, pp. 51-55.

New Review, September, 1974.

New Statesman, June 25, 1960; July 6, 1962; May 19, 1980; May 21, 1982, Stephen Brook, review of The Strangers Are All Gone, p. 23; January 6, 1984, Alan Brien, review of A Dance to the Music of Time, p. 22.

New Statesman and Society, February 3, 1995, Michael Horovitz, review of Journals 1982–1986, p. 39.

Newsweek, March 24, 1969; October 29, 1973; April 5, 1976; April 25, 1983, Gene Lyons, review of The Strangers Are All Gone, pp. 86-87; September 2, 1985, Gene Lyons, "The Dance of Time: At 79, Epic Novelist Anthony Powell Is Spry as Ever," pp. 66-67.

New Yorker, July 3, 1965; June 3, 1967; May 10, 1976; August 22, 1983, review of The Strangers Are All Gone, pp. 94-95; December 18, 1995, Jeremy Treglow, review of A Dance to the Music of Time, pp. 106-112.

New York Herald Tribune Books, February 11, 1962.

New York Review of Books, May 18, 1967; November 1, 1973; May 28, 1998, Christopher Hitchens, "Powell's Way," pp. 47-52.

New York Times, March 14, 1968; March 13, 1969; September 8, 1971; February 17, 1972; February 4, 1981, Anatole Broyard, review of Faces in My Time, section C, p. 21; November 16, 1984, Edwin McDowell, "An Author Wins Recognition Late," section C, p. 28; September 23, 1986, Jone Gross, review of The Fisher King, section C, p. 17.

New York Times Book Review, January 21, 1962; September 30, 1962; March 19, 1967; March 9, 1969; October 14, 1973; November 1, 1973; April 11, 1976; February 8, 1981, Frances Taliaferro, review of Faces in My Time, p. 15; June 26, 1983, review of The Strangers Are All Gone, pp. 9-11; January 22, 1984, Charles Michener, review of O, How the Wheel Becomes It!, p. 25; October 19, 1986, John Espey, review of The Fisher King, p. 30; February 21, 1988.

Observer, October 10, 1967; October 13, 1968; February 14, 1971; May 20, 1990, Anthony Burgess, review of Miscellaneous Verdicts.

Publishers Weekly, April 5, 1976; December 5, 1980, Genevieve Stuttaford, review of Faces in My Time, p. 47; September 16, 1983, Barbara A. Bannon, review of Oh, How the Wheel Becomes It!, p. 118; August 1, 1986, Sybil Steinberg, review of The Fisher King, p. 66; May 2, 1994, review of Under Review: Further Writings on Writers, 1946–1990, p. 298.

Saturday Review, March 18, 1967; March 8, 1969; November 11, 1973; April 17, 1976; August, 1983, William Cole, review of The Strangers Are All Gone, pp. 48-49.

Sewanee Review, spring, 1974; summer, 2001, Jay Parini, "Anthony Powell: 1905–2000," pp. 437-438.

South Atlantic Quarterly, winter, 1977, Kerry Mc-Sweeney, review of A Dance to the Music of Time.

Spectator, June 24, 1960; September 16, 1966; October 18, 1968; September 13, 1975; October 9, 1976; June 5, 1982; February 29, 1992, Stephen Spender, review of Under Review, pp. 33-34; January 28, 1995, Andrew Barrow, review of Journals 1982–1986, pp. 28-29; April 6, 1996, David Sexton, review of Journals, 1987–1989, pp. 27-28; May 17, 1997, Bevis Hillier, review of Journals 1990–1992, pp. 37-39; February 3, 2001, D.J. Taylor, review of A Writer's Notebook, p. 33.

Texas Quarterly, spring, 1978, Stephen J. Tapscott, review of A Dance to the Music of Time, pp. 105-106.

Time, August 11, 1958; March 3, 1967; March 28, 1969; March 9, 1981, Melvin Maddocks, review of Faces in My Time, pp. 72-73.

Times (London, England), April 3, 1980; May 13, 1982; June 16, 1983; April 3, 1986.

Times Literary Supplement, October 17, 1968; March 28, 1980; June 24, 1983; September 21, 1984; April 4, 1986; May 18-24, 1990, Philip Nicholas Furbank, review of Miscellaneous Verdicts, p. 524; March 20, 1992, David Plante, review of Under Review, p. 22.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), September 28, 1986; July 12, 1992, p. 1; September 25, 1994, Merle Rubin, review of Under Review, p. 6.

Twentieth Century, July, 1961.

Virginia Quarterly Review, summer, 1976; spring, 1978; autumn, 1985; autumn, 2001, review of To Keep the Ball Rolling, p. 133.

Voice Literary Supplement, February, 1984.

Washington Post Book World, April 4, 1976; May 30, 1976; October 9, 1977; September 17, 1978; January 18, 1981; October 12, 1986; December 13, 1987; July 26, 1992, Daniel Max, review of Miscellaneous Verdicts.

World Literature Today, summer, 1979.