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Loading... Anthony Powell: A Life (edition 2005)by Michael Barber
Work InformationAnthony Powell: A Life by Michael Barber
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. The full-length biography of a literary man who spanned multiple worlds - this in the sense that his origins in the upper-class are blended with less well-bred friends of his maturity. The best aspect of this biography is how it provides background and depth for the beautiful literary productions of one of the best authors of the twentieth century. ( ) no reviews | add a review
In the first full-length biography of Anthony Powell, Michael Barber--publisher, journalist, and man-about-town--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 the author No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.912Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1901-1945LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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