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Diary

Robert Irwin: Pinball and Despair, 7 July 1994

... other people are here who have no work to go to, but I do not talk to them. I have become what Anthony Powell would call an ‘afternoon man’. I do not see any ‘afternoon women’ and, in general, playing pinball is not a very good way of picking up beautiful girls. The only beautiful women I see are airbrush-painted on the backglass of the ...

Coats of Every Cut

Michael Mason, 9 June 1994

Robert Surtees and Early Victorian Society 
by Norman Gash.
Oxford, 407 pp., £40, September 1993, 0 19 820429 9
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... has come under the notice of fairly ambitious critics, such as Siegfried Sassoon, Quentin Bell and Anthony Powell. There is very little published comment on Surtees from his own day, but what there is tends to be emphatic about his fidelity to life. ‘The account of the medical worthies who first made the Handley waters famous,’ said ...

Come along, Alcibiades

John Bayley, 25 January 1996

Terence Rattigan: A Biography 
by Geoffrey Wansell.
Fourth Estate, 428 pp., £20, October 1995, 1 85702 201 7
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... had any idea that the young men in her son’s life were other than just ‘dear friends’. Yet Anthony Powell, who worked with him in the early days, writing scripts at Teddington Studios for ‘quota quickies’, reports in his memoirs that Rattigan ‘never made any particular secret of his homosexuality’ no matter whom he was talking to. The ...

Happy Knack

Ian Sansom: Betjeman, 20 February 2003

John Betjeman: New Fame, New Love 
by Bevis Hillier.
Murray, 736 pp., £25, November 2002, 0 7195 5002 5
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... Above all, the huge ambition and the appearance of indolence, a very English contradiction which Anthony Powell summed up in just three words: Betjeman, he said, had a ‘whim of iron’. Indeed he did. He ended one of his columns in the Spectator: ‘Is this all a bit arch and E.V. Lucas-y and Fourth Leaderish? Yes, it is, and all the better for ...

Not Quite Nasty

Colin Burrow: Anthony Burgess, 9 February 2006

The Real Life of Anthony Burgess 
by Andrew Biswell.
Picador, 434 pp., £20, November 2005, 0 330 48170 3
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... blush is over it should challenge us to think about how our tastes are made and why they change. Anthony Burgess is a 1960s sideboard of a writer. His range was improbable. He published 32 novels, composed symphonies, wrote two books on Joyce, a biography of Shakespeare and a study of the English language, as well as a large number of film scripts, most of ...

Where Does He Come From?

Sanjay Subrahmanyam: Placing V.S. Naipaul, 1 November 2007

A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling 
by V.S. Naipaul.
Picador, 193 pp., £16.99, September 2007, 978 0 330 48524 1
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... he had been sent on a scholarship from Trinidad in 1950). In 1957, Naipaul was befriended by Anthony Powell, who helped set his literary career on a firm footing. After Powell’s death in 2000 at the age of 94, Naipaul was asked by the editor of an unnamed literary weekly to write about him. Naipaul notes that in ...

Out of the jiffybag

Frank Kermode, 12 November 1987

For Love and Money: Writing, Reading, Travelling 1969-1987 
by Jonathan Raban.
Collins Harvill, 350 pp., £11.50, November 1987, 0 00 272279 8
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Original Copy: Selected Reviews and Journalism 1969-1986 
by John Carey.
Faber, 278 pp., £9.95, August 1987, 0 571 14879 4
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... on Mayhew. He’s not a slasher – though there is a very severe notice of the autobiographies of Anthony Powell and Peter Quennell – and he seems to enjoy being generous to other reviewers, as when he justly praises John Updike. He is full of gratitude to literary editors, commemorating Ian Hamilton’s work on the New Review in terms only this side ...

Wounding Nonsenses

E.S. Turner, 6 February 1997

The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh 
edited by Charlotte Mosley.
Hodder, 531 pp., £25, October 1996, 0 340 63804 4
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... yet to hear of him. In 1956, when the U and non-U silliness was at its height, Waugh learned that Anthony Powell had accepted a ‘degrading decoration’, namely a CBE. ‘I think it very WRONG,’ he wrote to Mitford, ‘that politicians should treat writers as second-grade civil servants. I trust you will stand out for CH or Dame.’ She replied that ...

What’s Happening in the Engine-Room

Penelope Fitzgerald: Poor John Lehmann, 7 January 1999

John Lehmann: A Pagan Adventure 
by Adrian Wright.
Duckworth, 308 pp., £20, November 1998, 0 7156 2871 2
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... the Liberal cause at the Punch table. John himself had been at Eton with Alan Pryce-Jones, Anthony Powell, Eric Blair and Cyril Connolly, who, we are told, stood at the door of his room in the Sixth Form Passage asking, ‘Well, Johnny Lehmann, how are you this afternoon?’ While he was at Trinity his sister Rosamond published her first ...

In Praise of Pritchett

Martin Amis, 22 May 1980

On the Edge of the Cliff 
by V.S. Pritchett.
Chatto, 179 pp., £4.95, February 1980, 0 7011 2438 5
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The Tale Bearers: Essays on English, American and Other Writers 
by V.S. Pritchett.
Chatto, 223 pp., £6.50, April 1980, 0 7011 2435 0
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... where simple inattention or mercenary haste must claim responsibility. And when, for instance, Anthony Powell writes a phrase like ‘standing on the landing’ you feel that it is the result of mandarin unconcern or high-handedness. Pritchett’s prose is full of these jangles – ‘Sitting behind the screen of the machine’ is a random example ...

Admiring

Stephen Wall, 26 March 1992

Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green 
edited by Matthew Yorke.
Chatto, 302 pp., £18, February 1992, 0 7011 3900 5
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Pack my bag 
by Henry Green.
Hogarth, 242 pp., £9.99, February 1992, 0 7012 0988 7
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Loving 
by Henry Green.
Harvill, 225 pp., £6.99, February 1992, 0 00 271185 0
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... which breed because a jordan isn’t provided and they have to leak in the chimney. In his memoirs Anthony Powell – Henry Yorke’s friend both at school and Oxford – comments on his ‘deep interest in the eternal contrast between everyday life’s flatness and its intensity’. Like all his best work, Loving shows his extraordinary gift for ...

Plonking

Ferdinand Mount: Edward Heath, 22 July 2010

Edward Heath 
by Philip Ziegler.
Harper, 654 pp., £25, June 2010, 978 0 00 724740 0
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... whip). His opponents in the Monday Club liked to identify Heath as the original of Widmerpool – Anthony Powell disavowed the attribution. In any case, Widmerpool would never have been able to lose himself in music or sailing, or to achieve such high standards in either. Rising to wartime lieutenant-colonel, Heath certainly impressed his superiors, but ...

Hurricane Brooke

Brian Bond, 2 September 1982

Alanbrooke 
by David Fraser.
Collins, 604 pp., £12.95, April 1982, 0 00 216360 8
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... suddenly pervaded the place. I could feel it stabbing through me. This was the CIGS. Thus Anthony Powell brilliantly evokes the dynamic personal impact of General Sir Alan Brooke in his novel The Military Philosophers. Brooke held positions of critical responsibility and as CIGS was titular head of the Army for the greater part of the Second ...

Subsistence Journalism

E.S. Turner, 13 November 1997

‘Punch’: The Lively Youth of a British Institution, 1841-51 
by Richard Altick.
Ohio State, 776 pp., £38.50, July 1997, 0 8142 0710 3
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... win military advancement. The reputation of Punch was always curiously high in America, though as Anthony Powell, its one-time literary editor, has pointed out, British advertisers were not supposed to know the extent of its circulation over there. So it is no surprise to find that the Ohio State University Press is behind this immensely long and ...

Don’t think about it

Jenny Diski: The Trouble with Sonia Orwell, 25 April 2002

The Girl from the Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell 
by Hilary Spurling.
Hamish Hamilton, 208 pp., £9.99, May 2002, 0 241 14165 6
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... If it was not a love match, it apparently cheered Orwell up in his last three months, according to Anthony Powell, though it greatly annoyed Stephen Spender, who resented being told by a snip of a girl to limit his political conversation with G.O. to twenty minutes. Her next marriage was in 1958 to Michael Pitt-Rivers, who had been jailed four years ...

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