{"product_id":"9780226677217","title":"To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell","description":"\u003cp\u003eTo earn the reputation of a literary giant within the generation of Waugh, Orwell, and Greene is no mean feat. To do so with the grace and genius that characterized Anthony Powell—whose twelve-volume \u003ci\u003eA Dance to the Music of Time\u003c\/i\u003e is possibly the only English-language work to match the majestic scope of Proust's \u003ci\u003eRemembrance of Things Past\u003c\/i\u003e—is nothing short of spectacular. Yet Powell himself remains absent from his writing; he was, said the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e, \"a writer of mordant succinctness who rewards the reader while revealing little of himself.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePowell did eventually reveal himself in four volumes of memoirs, published between 1976 and 1982. This edition of Anthony Powell's \u003ci\u003eMemoirs\u003c\/i\u003e is an abridged and revised version of those volumes, a version that has never before been published in this form in the United States. The result is not only a fascinating view of Powell as a man and an author but also a unique history of British literary society and the social elite Powell lampooned and moved within from the twenties through the eighties. From Eton and Oxford to his life as a novelist and critic, Powell observes all—the obscenity trial sparked by \u003ci\u003eLady Chatterley's Lover\u003c\/i\u003e; Shirley Temple's libel suit after Graham Greene reviewed \u003ci\u003eWee Willie Winkie\u003c\/i\u003e \"with even more than his usual verve\"—and paints vivid portraits of Kingsley Amis, V.S. Naipaul, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and countless others. Most importantly, Powell's lively memoirs banish all thought of the man as a relic of the British gentry. He was a modernist, a Tory, and more than a little interested in genealogy and peerage, but a man who, according to Ferdinand Mount, \"miraculously knew what life was like.\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Chicago Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48370851414256,"sku":"9780226677217","price":27.5,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780226677217_p0.jpg?v=1769913673","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780226677217","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}