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“... month after Huxley’s arrival in 1937, P.G. Wodehouse left, but J.B. Priestley, Hugh Walpole and Anthony Powell were all hawking their wares with varying degrees of success (Powell was hindered by the fact that his agent had dropped dead on Hollywood Boulevard a few days before his visit). Unlike Huxley, these other ...”

“... sort of inevitable banality. Even so accomplished and versatile a performer on the sexual theme as Anthony Powell is capable of error in the same direction, as when the writer X. Trapnel (a superlative creation) reveals the secret horror of the diabolical Pamela Flitton’s sexuality. The Pamela enigma, and its funniness both louche and sinister, is at ...”

“... Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (just as I had been inspired by Crome Yellow). He said that Anthony Powell and I were the only novelists he would buy without reading first. A.P. was his fag at Eton ... said he thought comedy was out of fashion now – not well thought of – we agreed on this. 20 May. Seeing a handsome Dorset woman at a petrol ...”

“... as to make the book a Mahabharata of English poses. Never – not in the works of Harold Acton, Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh combined – have sentences appeared so rhythmically in tune with a sense of the ridiculous, or so ready to snigger at the disaster of common beliefs. In that sense the book is a masterpiece – it contains the DNA of a ...”

“... reason now for Moore to fight shy of being a war artist.War artists’ art, like the war novels of Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, was stronger on boredom, home-front detail and character than adventure and horror. Nobody expected a Guernica – or if they did they didn’t get one. No Goya or Otto Dix emerged – the drawings Ronald Searle made in a ...”

“... Howard told him sent Seabrook back to writers who are in the Oxford Companion, Waugh, Betjeman, Anthony Powell and Jocelyn Brooke. I’m not sure that any other critic is capable of enthusing, in one long breath, about Brooke and David Peace (author of a tersely written novel sequence from the era of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper). Nobody else ...”

“... not be undervalued. It must be what appealed so strongly to Nabokov, as well as to the young Anthony Powell, who tells us that he picked up from it some of his own ideas about fictional structures. Lermontov’s humour could be said to reveal itself in a form of separatism: each point made, each fictional ‘touch’, seems wholly free and ...”

“... stuff that will fascinate and edify the working cognitive scientist. Mithen seduced me from the Anthony Powell that I was reading; I can’t imagine warmer commendation. Yes, but is Mithen’s theory true? For that matter, how well does it fit the ontogenetic theory that he uses as a model? And, for another matter, is the ontogenetic theory that he ...”

“... babies was to go away and put up in a hotel where he could write in peace. Many novelists, like Anthony Powell, found that they could not get down to work while hostilities were in progress. Not so Waugh, for whom hostilities were natural. In the beginning of the war he made time to write Put out more flags, one of his funniest books. By the end he had ...”

“... as Hollinghurst and Spufford, their solutions pose problems of their own. In Proust and Anthony Powell, the shock of character as it develops over time is situated within an immense continuity. Even so there can be a limit to what is plausible. Not every reader is convinced by the last incarnation of ...”

“... But he wanted to say something; his silence was being noted. ‘Where is Mr Graham Greene?’ Anthony Powell asked in a review of Authors Take Sides. So in December 1937, Greene published an article in the Spectator called ‘Alfred Tennyson Intervenes’. He recalled that what was happening now wasn’t the first instance of its kind. A hundred ...”

“... extraordinary high-pitched voice and exaggerated fidgeting. ‘He had curious movements,’ wrote Anthony Powell, ‘entering a room almost as if about to turn a cartwheel.’ In 1944, Donald Sinden found in a second-hand bookshop a copy of the attack he had made on Wilde and all his works thirty years earlier in Oscar Wilde and Myself. He made the ...”

“... of illustrious acknowledgments (again, I’ve only seen an advance proof) includes Lady Eccles and Anthony and Lady Violet Powell. Murray began the book when he was 16, still at Eton, and finished it a week before starting at Oxford. (Much of the work was done while teaching at a remote prep school in Scotland in the limbo ...”

“... afternoons, the kind of books you might find lining Dadie Rylands’s rooms, for instance. Anthony Blunt’s bookshelves were crucial in Single Spies, the look of an art historian’s bookshelves significantly different from those of a literary critic say. All this tends to pass the designer by. One knows that designers seldom read, but they don’t ...”

“... alternative to Kundera: natural, comic, unself-conscious and Czech.) Betjeman, Wodehouse, Austen, Anthony Powell and Larkin are all examples, for Bayley, of this kind of evasive magic, which is opposed again and again to what he calls ‘seriousness’. Any jobbing writer, it seems, can be ‘serious’ or at least can talk about ‘seriousness’. But ...”