The English author Anthony Dymoke Powell was born on 21 December 1905. He was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford where he met several other young writers including Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. Prior to World War II he worked in publishing and as a film-script writer, before becoming a full-time novelist and literary critic.

Powell is probably best known for his twelve-volume novel A Dance to the Music of Time (usually just referred to as Dance). He wrote a number of other novels and a biography of the seventeenth-century diarist John Aubrey. In addition Powell (pronounced Po-ell, by the way) was also a prolific literary critic and book reviewer for a number of periodicals including the Daily Telegraph, the Times Literary Supplement, Punch and the Spectator. He also published four volumes of memoirs, three volumes of diaries and two volumes of his selected literary criticism. He was married to the author Lady Violet Pakenham. Powell died on 28 March 2000 at his Somerset home.

Some Poets, Artists & ‘A Reference for Mellors’ is Anthony Powell’s long-awaited third and final volume of critical writings. Drawn from over four decades of regular reviews for the Daily Telegraph, as well as pieces for Apollo, Punch, the Times Literary Supplement, Encounter and Sotheby’s Preview Magazine, this collection shows Powell at his most incisive and beguiling.

From Chaucer to Dylan Thomas, Powell covers the length of the English canon. Lesser-known figures like John Skelton and William Davenant are reconsidered, while forgotten best-sellers and nineteenth-century
minor poets are uncovered.

The Artists vary from van Dyck to David Hockney and take in such eclectic subjects as portrait painters in India, Dickens’s illustrators, London statues and artists’ models along the way.

The collection closes with ‘A Reference for Mellors’, a gem of a parody, in which Mellors seeks a new career in the Dominions, only to have his prospective employer write to Lady Chatterley for a reference.

A. N. Wilson described Powell as ‘one of the twentieth-century giants of English literature’, and this collection certainly demonstrates his outstanding talent as reviewer and critic.