About himself, Anthony Powell never revealed an awful lot in his fortnightly reviews for the Telegraph, which he sustained with great distinction over fifty years. He was not averse to giving others a pasting (for example to Geoffrey Grigson, ‘most other reviewers lacking the guts to do so’), but generally you learnt little of what he thought about contemporary fiction , or the private details – so vital to an understanding of a novelist’s craft – of his own humdrum existence.

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