To Keep the Ball Rolling Memoirs (Complete 4 Vol. Set) Faces in My Time; Messengers of the Day; Strangers All Are Gone; Infants of the Spring

To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell #4

by Anthony Powell

The fourth and final volume of Powell's memoirs opens in 1952 and includes his term as Literary Editor of "Punch," completion of the monumental "A Dance to the Music of Time," and a gallery of pointed, perceptive portraits of Powell's contemporaries

Genres: Autobiography, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

People best know British writer Anthony Dymoke Powell for A Dance to the Music of Time , a cycle of 12 satirical novels from 1951 to 1975.

This Englishman published his volumes of work. Television and radio dramatizations subjected major work of Powell in print continuously. In 2008, The Times newspaper named Powell among their list of "the fifty greatest British writers since 1945."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony...

Reviews

[Sherwood Smith]

Powell is such a good writer, so compassionate yet clear-sighted, his syntonics frighteningly adept. I love his views on many of the famous writers, and their homes and spaces and interactions, of this period of his life.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

p22:

Since Dance to some extent celebrates the chance connexions that often pass unnoticed in life one of these should be mentioned. Violet, while supervising our younger son John in the sandpit of Park Square, used to read the typescript of A Buyer's Market before that book was published just before we left London. Among other small children playing in the sandpit was one pert and redhaired called Jane Asher. Miss Asher had then no idea she would play the part of Jean Templer (who starts to take a prominent role in A Buyer's Market), when the BBC began the radio adaptation of Dance in 1979.

At a literary conference in Bulgaria in 1977 [p180]:
Between two and three o'clock in the morning a great hammering reverberated on my bedroom door. This, I thought, must undoubtedly be the Secret Police. On his arrest Dostoevski had at least been aroused quietly from his slumbers. Assuming, so far as possible in pyjamas, the air of Bulldog Drummond, I opened the door. The man on the threshold, to all appearances a Bulgarian, must have seen, pyjamas or no, that I was English. He adapted to that language at once:
'Excuse me--you have a bottle-opener?'
'Alas, no.'
'Thank you, excuse me.'
He rambled off down the corridor to try some other likely number. I wondered how he chose likely bottle-opener owners; possibly a system of numerology connected with the numbers on the doors adding up to a magical combination.

[David]

Perhaps less unified than the earlier volumes, or, perhaps, reflecting the unity that is the diversity of increasing age, this last of Powell's memoirs still contains many gems--like the unlikely married lives of Rupert Hart-Davis, and, of course, the monkey throwing down the old newspaper in disgust and climbing as high as it can to look down on the world, as well as a few reflections on Shakespeare--that topic impossible to treat either briefly or with adequate affection--and shows, at the very least, that an aging (verging on elderly) man is not dead as long as he is alive (not as ridiculous a statement as it may at first seem).