The enduring message of Anthony Powell's work

Anthony Powell died on 28 March 2000, twenty-five years ago today. It is also fifty years since he completed his 12-novel series, A Dance to the Music of Time, written over a quarter of a century.

How well has this unique opus worn? With a title taken from Poussin’s masterpiece of the four seasons, Dance, has been described as ‘Proust Englished by P.G. Wodehouse’. But perhaps Powell’s closely-observed study of 20th-century bohemacy has suffered from being too real: its texture a trifle tweedy; its colours slightly faded.

Anthony Powell, the novelist, deserves to be read

Powell was not an escapist like Wodehouse; a moralist like Orwell, nor a satirist like Waugh. And yet his 3,000 pages, 1 million words and nearly 500 characters are still a singular and extraordinary achievement – a very English life over 60 years through the eyes of the narrator Nicholas Jenkins.

Auberon Waugh said on the publication of his father’s diaries, ‘[They] show that the world of Evelyn Waugh’s novels did in fact exist.’