“A great chronicle. . . . Absolutely fascinating and the most important fiction since the war. . . . I would rather read Powell than any English novelist now writing.”
 

Kingsley Amis

"Dry, cool, humorous, elaborately and accurately constructed and quintessentially English. It is more realistic than A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, to which it is often compared, and much funnier."

Evelyn Waugh

“Immensely entertaining and deeply serious. . . . Reading Powell is like living someone else's life, inextricably tangled with one's own."

New York Times

"One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . A vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human existence."

Naomi Bliven | New Yorker

“I had that usual "'why-on-earth-didn't-i-think-of-that feeling I always get when I read your  books. I study the stuff under a microscope, and I still can’t see how you do it.”

P. G. Wodehouse | letter to Anthony Powell

"A series of intertwining stories, in mood at once hilarious, raffish, and melancholy. . . . The reader who likes to watch history unfold as social comedy while he savors the astringent taste of the best English prose is urged to immerse himself in the works of this astute and enchanting writer."

Arthur Schlesinger | Life Magazine

"A book which creates a world and eplores it in depth, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and complicated as Proust's."

Elizabeth Janeway | New York Times

"When the time comes for the historian to get a sense of what life was like for the British between and during the two wars he can wrap up the whole era with Anthony Powell's incalculably brilliant series."

Time Magazine

"The best modern novel since Ulysses."

Clive James

"Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."

Chicago Tribune