A fan's biogrpahy …

… Anthony Powell would purr if he could read this shrewd, fond biography by Hilary Spurling. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Although a distinguished book critic himself, not least for these pages, Powell held journalists in the same regard as reviewers ("stupid, incompetent, often envious, rarely grasping the point of any given book"). Private Eye parodied his posture like this: "20th January 1995. Re-read various fan letters confirming that I am the leading novelist of my generation. Why is it, one wonders, that my fans are so unusually percipient?… Re-read Hamlet by Shakespeare, a competent but unreliable author, though by now rather dated and always prone to worthiness. Never to my knowledge managed a novel."