In the first full-length biography of Anthony Powell, publisher, journalist, man-about-town, and author Michael Barber takes a close look at the man and the writer. He finds someone whose temperament was often at war with his upbringing. The son of an army officer, educated at Eton and Oxford, Powell chose as his closest friends people like Malcolm Muggeridge and the composer Constant Lambert, who were not out of the top drawer, or the one below it. Although happily married for more than sixty years to Lady Violet Pakenham, the daughter of an Earl, he admitted that he had always been attracted by girls who looked as if they d slept under a bush for a week.

Powell believed that creative writing was, like alchemy, a mysterious, indefinable process by which experience became art. Michael Barber focuses on the experience that provided Powell with his raw material. He pays particular attention to the entre-deux-guerres, that sharply divided cultural interlude when the artists and good-timers with whom Powell identified in the twenties were followed, in the thirties, by the politicians and the prigs. Amusing, candid, and highly entertaining, this is a delightfully readable account of one of the author inevitably regarded as the English Proust (Norman Shrapnel, The Guardian).

When future generations wish to understand the texture of 20th century English life, their best source will be Powell, and A Dance to the Music of Time." John Perry, Salon

Michael Barber is a writer and broadcaster whose previous biography, The Captain: The Life of Simon Raven, was described by the Evening Standard as a minor masterpiece and the Times as hugely entertaining and scrumptiously readable. He conducted the Paris Review interview with Anthony Powell and has written Powell s entry for the New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.