The author of the award-winning Matisse: A Life gives us the definitive biography of the critic, editor, and novelist known as "the English Proust"--and takes us deep into the heart of twentieth-century London's literary life. Anthony Powell (1905-2000), best known for his twelve-volume comic masterpiece, A Dance to the Music of Time, was also the author of sixteen earlier novels, plays, and biographies, five memoirs, and three volumes of journals, and was a prolific literary critic and book reviewer. Between the two world wars he kept company with rowdy, hard-up writers and painters--and painters' models--in the London where Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis loomed large. He counted Evelyn Waugh and Henry Green among his lifelong friends, and his circle included the Sitwells, Graham Greene, George Orwell, Philip Larkin, and Kingsley Amis. Now, drawing on his letters, diaries, and interviews, Hilary Spurling--herself a longtime friend of Powell's--has written a fresh and masterful portrait. Insightful, poignant, and cinematic in scope, this biography is as much a brilliant tapestry of a seminal moment in London's literary life as it is a revelation of an iconic literary figure.