Anthony Powell

Dancing to the Music of Time

By: Hilary Spurling

Narrated by: Jonathan Cowley

Length: 16 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher's summary

The author of the award-winning Matisse: A Life gives us the definitive biography of writer Anthony Powell - and takes us deep into the heart of 20th-century London's literary life.

Insightful, lively, and enthralling, this biography is as much a brilliant tapestry of a seminal era in London’s literary life as it is a revelation of an iconic literary figure. Best known for his 12-volume comic masterpiece, A Dance to the Music of Time, the prolific writer and critic Anthony Powell (1905-2000) kept company between the two world wars with rowdy, hard-up writers and painters - and painters’ models - in the London where Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis loomed large. He counted Evelyn Waugh and Henry Green among his lifelong friends, and his circle included the Sitwells, Graham Greene, George Orwell, Philip Larkin, and Kingsley Amis.

Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, Hilary Spurling - herself a longtime friend of Powell’s as well as an award-winning biographer - has produced a fresh and powerful portrait of the man and his times.

©2018 Hilary Spurling (P)2018 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“In the manner of the best literary biographers, Spurling fluidly incorporates the life and works of British novelist Anthony Powell, whose 12-novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time...remains one of the high-watermarks of the twentieth-century literature.... One hopes that this impeccable, thoroughly readable biography will help bring new readers to an author whose central subject, ‘human beings behaving,’ should never go out of fashion.” (Bill Ott, Booklist)

“Hilary Spurling’s new biography, Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time, is a fond portrayal of the man sometimes called ‘the English Proust’.... [Spurling] is a superb biographer...and this new book is everything readers have come to expect from her. It’s thorough, judicious and gracefully written.” (Charles McGrath, The New Yorker)

“Spurling, author of well-received biographies of artists and writers such as Henri Matisse and novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, offers the definitive account of Anthony Powell, one of the most prominent and respected 20th-century writers.... Spurling is especially good at delineating Powell’s many relationships with...leading literary figures such as George Orwell, Malcom Muggeridge, Constant Lambert, the Sitwells, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Green.” (Morris Hounion, Library Journal)

Dreadful Narration

I'm returning this audio book after two chapters because I just can't handle the narration. Non-standard intonations, unsuccessful efforts at adding "life" to the reading, gaps for breath in the strangest places. It was all too confusing and distracting. The book deserves better so I will read it.