Anthony Powell: A Life - Hardcover

MICHAEL BARBER

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1585676187 ISBN 13: 9781585676187

Publisher: Overlook Hardcover, 2004

Synopsis

In this biography of Anthony Powell, publisher, journalist, man-about-town and author of the "Dance to the Music of Time" sequence, Michael Barber takes a close look at the man and the writer. He finds someone whose temperament was often at war with his upbrining. The son of an army officer, educated at Eton and Balliol, Powell chose as his closest friends people like Malcolm Muggeridge and the composer, Constant Lambert, who were not out ot the top drawer or the one below it. And, although happily married for over sixty years to Lady Violet Pakenham, the daughter of an earl, he admitted that he had "always been attracted by girls who looked as they'd slept under a bush for a week". Powell believed that creative writing was, like alchemy, a mysterious, indefinable proces by which experience became art. Michael Barberfocuses on the experience that provided Powell with his raw material. He pays particular attention to the "entre-deux-guerres", that sharply divided cultural interlude when the artists and good-timers with whom Powell identified in the twenties were followed, in the thirties, by the politicians and the prigs.

About this title

Review

"When future generations wish to understand the texture of 20th-century English life, their best source will be Powell, and A Dance to the Music of Time."

About the Author

Sir Michael Barber has been chief education advisor at Pearson since September 2011 and is the founder of Delivery Associates. In 2001, he founded the Prime Minister s Delivery Unit in No10, Downing Street, which he ran until 2005. In this role he was responsible for ensuring delivery of the government's domestic policy priorities across health, education, crime reduction, criminal justice, transport and immigration. The sustained focus on delivery from the heart of government, and the processes the PMDU developed, were a significant innovation in government, of interest to numerous other countries and global institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank. Tony Blair described the PMDU as utterly invaluable. From 2005 to 2011 he was a partner at McKinsey and Company where he played a leading role in creating a public sector practice and founded the global education practice. In 2009 he founded, in Washington DC, the Education Delivery Institute, a not-for-profit organisation that works with more than a dozen US States to apply systematic delivery approaches to improving outcomes in schools and public higher education. Since 2009, on behalf of the British government, he has visited Pakistan over 30 times to oversee a radical and, so far, successful reform of the Punjab education system. He is the author of numerous books and articles, such as "How to Run a Government "published by Penguin" "in 2015 and "Instruction to Deliver (Methuen 2008)", which tells the story of his time in Downing Street, and was described by the Financial Times as one of the best books about British government for many years. "Deliverology 101" is the textbook on how to deliver in government and was written as the curriculum for the Education Delivery Institute.

Edition details

• Publisher: Overlook Hardcover
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1585676187
• ISBN 13: 9781585676187
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256