Anthony Powell Society
The Anthony Powell Society
is a charitable literary society devoted to the
author Anthony Powell, 1905-2000.
The Society is governed by its
Constitution
which states that the charitable aim is
to advance for the public benefit,
education and interest in the life and works of the
English author Anthony Dymoke Powell.
Founded in June 2000, the Society was
awarded charitable status in April 2003.
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The Quotable Powell
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Nothing could be further from the caricature of Powell's novels as a farrago of braying, upper-class gossip.
Here is a whole world of bruised individuals groping through the twilight,
as often as not dislocated from their own time.
The question of class is relevant only in the sense that there hangs about so many of
Powell's characters and venues an aura not merely of having come down in the world
but of never having been very securely up in it.
-- -- --
Ferdinand Mount
discussing Dance and specifically Ted Jeavons
at the 2011 Conference
Contributed by Keith Marshall
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Anthony Dymoke Powell
1905-2000
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Anthony Powell, Author
The English author Anthony Dymoke Powell was born on 21 December 1905.
He was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford
where he met several other young writers and artists
including Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green, John Betjeman, Graham Greene and Osbert Lancaster.
Prior to World War II he worked in publishing
and as a film-script writer,
before becoming a full-time novelist and literary critic.
Powell is probably best known for his twelve-volume novel
A Dance to the Music of Time
(usually just referred to as Dance).
He wrote a seven other novels and a biography of the
seventeenth-century diarist John Aubrey.
In addition Powell (pronounced Po-ell, by the way) was also
a prolific literary critic and book reviewer for
a number of periodicals including
the Daily Telegraph,
the Times Literary Supplement,
Punch
and the Spectator.
He also published four volumes of memoirs, three volumes of diaries and
three volumes
(one posthumously)
of his selected literary criticism.
Powell was in addition an accomplished genealogist,
publishing almost 40 papers on Welsh genealogy,
and was in later years a Vice-President of the Society of Genealogists.
He was made a CBE in 1956 and a Companion of Honour in 1988.
Powell was married (in 1934) to the author Lady Violet Pakenham;
they had two sons.
He died peacefully on 28 March 2000 at his Somerset home. |
