Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time Paperback – Illustrated, 5 November 2019

I started reading A Dance to the Music of Time as a distraction to revising for Finals in 1977 and the sequence has meant a lot to me and led to an interest in Constant Lambert, who was a close friend of AP. I have collected all the novels, even the very slight final ones, and the memoirs, also pretty weak. I found this biography disappointing; rather like Evelyn Waugh the knowledge of the author's life rather detracts from enjoyment of the literary works. I felt the author was holding back, probably because of her close links to the Powell family. The photographs and artworks were often too tiny to decipher, and there were few new insights to anyone steeped in Powelliana. Lambert's affair with Margot Fonteyn is barely mentioned, he was a truly tragic figure, whereas Powell comes over as rather tiresome. I am hesitating about passing the book to my son, who is also a huge fan of the Dance.

Having read Powell's novels, plays, memoirs and journals, I hesitated before buying Hilary Spurling's biography: could there truly be anything that she could write about Powell's life that would add anything worthwhile to what Powell had written himself? I'm glad that I overcame my doubts. This is a book that most Powellians would enjoy, I think.Ms Spurling comes to her task eminently well qualified for it. Firstly, her biography is authorised, so she had full access to the Powell family's archive. Secondly, she was herself a friend of Powell's for more than thirty years. Thirdly, she shares something of Powell's own sensibility; like him, she has a keen appreciation of absurdity and an aesthetic that majors on literature and painting - her earlier books include lives of Matisse and Ivy Compton-Burnett. And fourthly, she is a biographer who researches diligently and writes with great skill - she has won several important literary prizes.I wouldn't claim that her biography is quite as absorbing as Powell's own work. In essence, what she gives us is the raw ingredients that Powell used in the great banquet of his fiction, and it was, so to speak, the genius of Powell's cookery that made his art so delicious. But there's no little fascination in learning things about Powell's life that his own books omitted, and also in glimpsing something of the alchemy that turned the material of his experience into the gold of his stories. If there's a degree of superficiality about Ms Spurling's blizzard of names, holidays, parties and romances, that's not something that I'd reproach her for - Powell himself was, I think, a man more absorbed by the surface of things than the world's mysterious depths, and no biography of him could be other than rather gossipy.Penguin have done a fine job of producing Miss Spurling's work. Her book's 510 pages include 56 pages of source notes and a 22 page index. Fifty-seven black and white illustrations are integrated into the text (some, admittedly, ridiculously small), and thirteen coloured plates bring us some Powellian art, including, of course, A Dance to the Music of Time. Coloured endpapers reproduce some of The Chantry's boiler room collage: a phantasmagoria of photographs, paintings and drawings that nicely sum up Powell's vision of the marvellously variegated tragedy and comedy of human existence..

Just as Nick Jenkins, the narrator of 'A Dance to the Music of Time', remains an elusive figure, so, as others have noted, Powell often seems almost on the periphery of his own biography. Perhaps this reflects reality: a rare subject genuinely more interested in other people than in himself, or perhaps driven to unusual self-effacement by his peripatetic childhood and extraordinary father. As Jenkins might put it: ‘who can say?’I found the early chapters, with their breathless parade of friends and acquaintances, rather exhausting: I enjoyed the book more once Powell had married and his life became more boring. But the book’s great virtue was in prompting me to re-read 'Venusberg' and 'A Question of Upbringing'. My enjoyment of both was enhanced by knowing more about how far they did and didn't reflect Powell’s own experience of Eton, Oxford and of relations with women as a young man. And for that I shall remain very grateful to Hilary Spurling.

written after the longest gestation period ( 20 years?)I found it slightly disappointing. Excellent portrait of Violet though!perhaps Hilary Spurling knew him too well . The diaries give a much better and more interesting picture of him. Curious silence on the sons and grandchildren too.

After reading it, i knew little more about his character and personality than before.A will of the wisp.Introverted?Who knows? So much effort and time gone into writing this biography and so little understanding of the man for the reader.