British novelist Anthony Powell, whose 12-volume epic A Dance to the Music of Time took him 20 years to write, has died aged 94, his family said yesterday. The sequence spanned a radically changing English society from 1914, the year the first World War broke out, to the 1970s, and featured the archetypal social-climbing Kenneth Widmerpool at its centre.
Powell, educated at Eton, and Oxford, wrote a string of other novels and journals, but it was the Music of Time that secured his place in 20th century British literature.
Nicole Kidman did it, famously, in a small London theatre. Now fellow Hollywood star Kathleen Turner is also preparing to bare all on stage. Turner, who recently complained that there were no decent parts for women of her age - she is 45 - is to appear nude in the West End stage adaptation of the 1960s novel and film, The Graduate.
The family of the Blairs' former nanny say they can no longer go out on the street since the storm surrounding publication of their daughter's account of life inside Downing Street. Ros Mark's mother Midge said the family had been innocent victims.
Cherie Blair this week settled her legal action against the publishers of the Mail on Sunday over the publication of the material.