Anthony Powell - excerpts from A Writer's Notebook

For sixty years, Anthony Powell kept a working notebook, a collection of quotations, phrases, observations and ideas for book titles that he thought worth preserving and that he wanted to record and on occasion return to.  It has been a bedside book of mine for a while and what follows is a selection of particular favourites:

Assignations in the London Library.

She wrote in a large untidy hand, like that of a vicious child.

They discuss mineral waters as people do wine.

There was an elderly man who looked as if he might have held a commission in the Romanian Army Service Corps.

A is having an affair with B’s wife, and tries to teach her habits of punctuality, so that B too shall profit in some way from the situation.

He likes flogging dead horses and live women.

A man explaining yachts to a tart.

A young man has a romantic night with his mistress, but in the morning a workman arrives at a very early hour.

A hunchback being sick.

Some women seem to imagine that one has nothing better to do than to sit up all night listening to anecdotes about their first husband.

I envy you your height, you could wear very loud checks.

‘Shall I sing “Frankie and Johnny”?’  ‘No, anything but that.’

The snobbery of loving fat women.

He was killed playing croquet.

He was with a woman who looked old enough, but by no means ugly enough, to be his mother.

One of the reasons that films are so bad is that producers assume that a class of picture-goer exists, stupider and slower witted and more vulgar than themselves, which would, of course, be impossible.