Anthony Powell (1906 -2000)

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The novelist Anthony Powell is described by his publisher as one of the "greatest English writers of the 20th century".

His novels were generally well appreciated by reviewers; in more recent years it was a collection of his journals that created the most interest. Throughout them he sprayed a stream of acidic comments about his contemporaries: Laurie Lee was "utterly unreadable", Graham Greene "absurdly overrated", while Virginia Woolf was a "dreadful woman ... humourless, envious, spiteful".

He is the last member of one of Britain's most celebrated literary generations, and was one of a group of writers that flourished in a Britain that has long disappeared which included Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, John Betjeman, George Orwell and W H Auden of which the first three were photographed by Bill Brandt.

Described as a social comic novelist, Powell's most famous work was the 12-volume novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time. The work, which was adapted for television three years ago, was a detailed examination of the life of an English aristocratic family stretching from the First World War to the 1970s. It was famous for the character Widmerpool, ruthlessly ambitious and disliked but still something of an irresistible anti-hero.