Best known for his 12-volume comic masterpiece, A Dance to the Music of Time, the prolific writer and critic Anthony Powell (1905-2000) kept company between the two world wars with rowdy, hard-up writers and painters—and painters' models—in the London where Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis loomed large. He counted Evelyn Waugh and Henry Green among his lifelong friends, and his circle included Graham Greene, George Orwell, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, and the Sitwells. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, Hilary Spurling—herself a longtime friend of Powell—has produced a powerful portrait of the man and his times.