Some Poets, Artists and `a Reference for Mellors`

Some Poets, Artists & ‘A Reference for Mellors’ is Anthony Powell’s long-awaited third and final volume of critical writings. Drawn from over four decades of regular reviews for the Daily Telegraph, as well as pieces for Apollo, Punch, the Times Literary Supplement, Encounter and Sotheby’s Preview Magazine, this collection shows Powell at his most incisive and beguiling. From Chaucer to Dylan Thomas, Powell covers the length of the English canon. Lesser-known figures like John Skelton and William Davenant are reconsidered, while forgotten best-sellers and nineteenth-centuryminor poets are uncovered. The Artists vary from van Dyck to David Hockney and take in such eclectic subjects as portrait painters in India, Dickens’s illustrators, London statues and artists’ models along the way. The collection closes with ‘A Reference for Mellors’, a gem of a parody, in which Mellors seeks a new career in the Dominions, only to have his prospective employer write to Lady Chatterley for a reference. A. N. Wilson described Powell as ‘one of the twentieth-century giants of English literature’, and this collection certainly demonstrates his outstanding talent as reviewer and critic.