The English author Anthony Dymoke Powell was born in London on 21 December 1905. He was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford where he met several other young writers and artists including Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green, John Betjeman, Graham Greene and Osbert Lancaster. 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 sequence A Dance to the Music of Time (usually just referred to as Dance). He wrote a further seven other novels, a biography of the seventeenth-century diarist John Aubrey and two plays.
Powell was also a prolific literary critic and book reviewer for several periodicals including the Daily Telegraph, Times Literary Supplement, Punch and The Spectator. He published four volumes of memoirs, three volumes of diaries and three volumes (one posthumously) of his selected literary criticism.
On top of all his writing, Powell was an accomplished genealogist, publishing almost 40 papers on Welsh genealogy. Later years a Vice-President of the Society of Genealogists.
He was made a CBE in 1956 and a Companion of Honour in 1988 . Powell was married (in December 1934) to the author Lady Violet Pakenham; they had two sons. He died peacefully on 28 March 2000 at his Somerset home.
We designed these covers to work as a set using a motif or cartouche in the central area to take the book’s title
James Broom-Lynne designed the original Dance To The Music of Time. As these add-on titles were not part of the Dance series but collections of his journalism and a book written in the style of the author. We designed them to echo that original look.
James Broom-Lynne
The original series design by James Broom-Lynne
An example of James Broom Lynne’s design for another publisher.