The obituaries recently published for Anthony Powell are infused with elegy, as though marking the end of a tradition. Here was the last man left with the confidence to write as he pleased. The room he occupied in the house of English literature was distinct, somewhere on a staircase nobody else climbed. Before the last war, he had published several Firbankian novels so light and comic that they are almost disembodied. For more than fifty years he wrote regular book reviews for The Daily Telegraph with a gruffness all their own. From 1951 onwards, the twelve volumes of his roman-fleuve, A Dance to the Music of Time, appeared with clockwork punctuality, one every two years. Four volumes of autobiography finally depicted the social tissues out of which he had woven his fiction.

Powell once explained that “I have absolutely no picture of myself.” Elsewhere he also said that he had begun to write because he couldn’t think wh ...

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