Anthony Dymoke Powell CH CBE (/ˈpoʊəl/ POH-əl;[1] 21 December 1905 – 28 March 2000) was an English novelist best known for his 12-volume work A Dance to the Music of Time, published between 1951 and 1975.

Wells-Dymoke was a descendant of a land-owning family in Lincolnshire, hereditary Champions to monarchs since the reign of Richard II of England.

Upon his arrival in London after Oxford, part of Powell's social life centered around attendance at formal debutante dances at houses in Mayfair and Belgravia.

[11][12] Powell was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1956 Birthday Honours,[13] and in 1973, he declined an offer of knighthood.

The individuals to whom Powell dedicated his books and memoirs provide the context of his range of friends and literary connections including John Bayley, Robert Conquest, Henry d'Avigdor-Goldsmid, Antonia Fraser, Roy Jenkins, Hugh Massingberd, Arthur Mizener, and Edith Sitwell.

Upon the outbreak of the Second World War, Powell, at age 34, joined the British Army as a second lieutenant, making him more than 10 years older than most of his fellow subalterns, not at all well prepared for military life, and lacking in experience.

Powell joined the Welch Regiment and was stationed in Northern Ireland at the time of air raids in Belfast.

His superiors found uses for his talents, resulting in a series of transfers that brought him to special training courses designed to produce a nucleus of officers to deal with the problems of military government after the Allies had defeated the Axis powers.

Later for a short time he was posted to the Cabinet Office, to serve on the Secretariat of the Joint Intelligence Committee, securing promotions along the way.

Despite a holiday trip to the Soviet Union in 1936, he remained unsympathetic to the popular-front, leftist politics of many of his literary and critical contemporaries.

[23] Powell married Lady Violet Pakenham (1912–2002),[24] sister of Lord Longford, on 1 December 1934 at All Saints, Ennismore Gardens, Knightsbridge.

[25] Their first son, Tristram, was born in April 1940, but Powell and his wife spent most of the war years apart, while he served in the Welch Regiment and later in the Intelligence Corps.

Anticipating the difficulties of creative writing during wartime, Powell began to assemble material for a biography of 17th-century writer John Aubrey.

Its characters, many modelled loosely on real people, surface, vanish, and reappear throughout the sequence but Powell claimed that it was not a roman à clef.

[31] In parallel with his creative writing, Powell served as the primary fiction reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement.

From 1958 to 1990, he was a regular reviewer for The Daily Telegraph, resigning after a vitriolic personal attack on him by Auberon Waugh appeared in that newspaper.

His Writer's Notebook was published posthumously in 2001, and a third volume of critical essays, Some Poets, Artists, and a Reference for Mellors, appeared in 2005.

Alan Furst, an author of spy novels, has noted of him, "Powell does everything a novelist can do, from flights of aesthetic passion to romance to comedy high and low.

The novel sequence was earlier adapted by Graham Gauld and Frederick Bradnum for a BBC Radio 4 26-part series broadcast between 1978 and 1981.

[39] In 2000 scholars founded The Anthony Powell Society to advance for the public benefit, education and interest in his life and works.

A centenary exhibition in commemoration of Powell's life and work was held at the Wallace Collection, London, from November 2005 to February 2006.

[40][41][42] A Blue plaque was mounted on 16 September 2023 at 1 Chester Gate London NW1 where Powell began writing A Dance to the Music of Time.