JOURNALS: Complete in Three Volumes. Vol. I: 1982-1986; Vol. II: 1987-1989; Vol. III: 1990-1992.

First editions, first printings. Complete in three volumes. Original black cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dustwrappers, each with Mark Boxer's wonderful line drawing of Powell to the front panel. A fine set, the bindings square and firm, the cloth and gilt sharp, the contents clean throughout. Mild toning as usual to the pages of the first volume (the paper stock a lower quality than that of the subsequent instalments). In the fine, bright wrappers with just a touch of wear to the upper rear edge of Vol. 3 and a few light scratches to the rear panel of the same volume. Not price-clipped (each volume priced £20.00 to the front flap). An uncommonly sharp and attractive set.

Anthony Powell began keeping a journal in 1982 during a hiatus in his fiction writing (the novels 'O, How the Wheel Becomes It!' and 'The Fisher King' were written during the period covered in these books). In the introduction to the first volume, the author's wife Violet stresses that Powell had until this time "never before kept any diary more detailed than an engagement calendar." The journals cover everything: social encounters (the cast includes Osbert Lancaster, Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Lord Longford, Lord David Cecil... the list is endless), reminiscences, gossip, and of course reading. In his Spectator review of the concluding volume (May 17, 1997), Bevis Hillier noted that "like all good diarists, Powell gives the impression that he is writing for himself, not for us or posterity; there is no need to keep up the charm offensive." As such, when writing about Virginia Woolf, Powell recalls "What a dreadful woman she was, humourless, envious, spiteful, the embodiment of all the Victorian prejudices against which she was supposed to be in revolt." Graham Greene's novels, meanwhile, are "vulgarised Conrad, to which tedious Roman Catholic propaganda is added." Of Henry Green, he writes "My final judgement on Henry, my oldest intimate friend who meant a great deal to me when we were both growing up, is that he was really rather a shit." The journals are, however, more measured than such examples suggest. "Most good novelists make life seem more interesting than it is", John Lanchester wrote in his LRB review of the Journals (May, 1997). "The very fact that their work offers a continuous aesthetic or psychic frisson is a kind of falsehood, a betrayal of reality; and one of the hardest things for any writer to capture is the feeling that nothing much is happening." Lanchester singles out Powell's supreme "ability to capture [...] dailiness and ordinariness, and to combine it with a range of incidents and characters as broad as that tackled by any English-language novelist this century." He is referring primarily to Powell's masterpiece, the twelve volumes of 'A Dance to the Music of Time', but it is the same patient attention to the unspectacular that characterises these entertaining diaries.