From The Times, March 30, 2000

Anthony Powell was the last of the grand old men of 20th-century English letters. Master chronicler of a minutely delineated social scene, he combined an acute eye and ear with a fastidious intelligence and a mordant, understated (and often underrated) sense of humour. His 12-volume novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time - rather un- satisfactorily adapted for television in 1997 - choreographs a cast of more than 300 characters through a rich and melancholy comedy of life played out on the margins between high-society and bohemia. The work is a triumph of tenacity and organisation, its patterns crossing and weaving in a vivid and panoramic social history, everywhere enlivened by the dry irony and spry panache of a virtuoso gossip.

For many readers the Dance sequence was addictive. When a new book by Powell fell into his hands, Philip Larkin once said, "I hang the equivalent of 'Gone Fishing' on my door and tear at the wrapper with a connoisseur's anticipation and a schoolboy's greed."

Fictional creations in Powell's world - such as the ghastly Widmerpool, with his hideously detailed and humourless conversation, the extrovert socialite Lady Molly Jeavons, or the libidinous Peter Templer with his satyr's ears - all seemed to take on a life of their own. Sometimes, Powell said, his wife would ask: " 'Do you remember when such-and-such a thing happened?' and I think a little and have to say: 'No, no that never really took place. It was in...whatever book it was in.' "

Much time and curiosity have been devoted to unearthing similarities between Powell's fictional characters and his real-life aquaintances such as George Orwell, John Gals-worthy, Dylan Thomas, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ivy Compton Burnett and Somerset Maugham. Yet Powell was always scathing about a game so "tedious to myself, congenial to readers of my novels". He maintained that "if someone is good for being a 'character' he is probably good for being many characters. You can form the basis of perhaps half a dozen people from one human model."

But it is the oblique and detached character of Nicholas Jenkins, probably the most invisible narrator in 20th-century literature, who seems to reflect most of the author himself. Powell was a diffident and evasive man, self deprecatingly amused by the success of his work. As he explained in his memoirs: "Some people have this complete picture of themselves. I have absolutely no picture of myself at all."

Yet, for all his self-effacement, Powell's reputation was that of a fearsome snob. His memoirs, To Keep the Ball Rolling, jog enjoyably along to the patter of falling names. While still a young man, Powell equipped himself with a full set of Burke's Peerage, Baronetage and Landed Gentry and these were undoubtedly the most thumbed volumes in his library. He shared with Proust, to whom he was inevitably compared, a passion for genealogy, deploring biographies which did not start with at least one chapter of ancestors. His own memoirs begin with one Rhys the Hoarse who lived from 1169 to 1234. He and his wife, Powell readily admitted, "absolutely love looking people up. If there were a Burke's Bank Clerks I would buy it." Yet at the root of his insatiable snobbery, so often an embarrassment to his devotees, is found that voracious interest in people and the labyrinthine connections between them which was to form the basis of his literary success.

Anthony Dymoke Powell was born, appropriately, on the Feast Day of the sceptical St Thomas. His father, a lieutenant-colonel in The Welch Regiment, gave himself over to a moroseness of spirit, occasionally enlivened by mercurial fits of flaring temper. His mother devoted her time to placating her husband. So Anthony, as an only child, was left largely to his own devices. Perhaps it was this solitariness which fostered in him the cool precision and ironic detachment which were later to mark his work. His housemaster at Eton noted that, though modest and unselfish, he did not appear easily to make friends. Other boys found him "superior and coldly critical". At Eton, he never made the acquaintance of George Orwell, Cyril Connolly or Henry Green, all fellow pupils of his time.

Later, going up to Balliol College, Oxford, he likewise had only a passing acquaintance with Evelyn Waugh. Powell was, by his own account, an unremarkable contemporary of a noteworthy generation, and in 1926 he came down with a third-class degree.

His father procured him a job with the publisher, Gerald Duckworth. This was congenial work, offering him, he later said, less a career than an occupation "in the sense that I used to empty the inkpots, interview wrapper design artists, deal with lunatics, that sort of thing". He lived a fairly reclusive life venturing, he recalled, only occasionally into the fringes of bohemia when, from time to time, "an invitation would arrive from two totally unknown lesbians. There were parties on a boat called The Friendship...with an enormous amount to drink and one would catch a glimpse of Ada Levenson wrapped up in black shawls."

Powell began to write not so much because he was ambitious, but because then "absolutely every literate young man was writing a novel". His work with Duckworth's was excellent training. He had to sift the mediocre manuscripts of hundreds of hopeful novelists a year, and this was to instil a perfectionism about his craft.

His first novels, Afternoon Men, Venusberg, and From a View to a Death were published in the three years from 1931. Elegant and crisply ironic, they established his voice and a small reputation. But although these and his other prewar works - Agents and Patients (1936) and What's Become of Waring (1939) - contain some fine comic scenes, they are too much under the influence of Evelyn Waugh and of Waugh's own early master, Ronald Firbank.

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