'She was not the Lady Avon at all ... but 20th the Avon Lady'

Anthony Powell began publishing his journals to critical acclaim in 1995, prompting a brilliant pastiche by CRAIG BROWN in Private Eye. For all its affection, the piece also pinioned the aspects of Powell's work which always galled some readers, notably snobbery and magisterial conceit

January: V and I attended pre-luncheon drinks with the Somersets at Gloucester. Then on to the Gloucesters in Somerset.

The Devonshires had brought Kent along. Halfway through luncheon, the butler informed us that Lady Avon was at the door.

"Tell her to join us!" said Gloucester, drawing up a chair for her. She sat down and was halfway through her main course (medaillons de veau, pommes Lyonnaises, epinards la crme - all perfectly eatable), entertaining us with fulsome praise of a new lemon-scented shower gel, whatever that may be, when it emerged that the butler had misheard. She was not the Lady Avon at all, but the Avon Lady.

"Surely I might interest you gents in a two-in-one apple shampoo and conditioner?" she asked as she was escorted to the door. Quite intolerable.

The claret was not unenjoyable.

In the afternoon, reread complete works of Graham Greene. Pretty thin stuff.

Deeply unpleasant fellow and, one feels, highly conceited: he loathed handing out praise to his contemporaries, retaining all his warmest approval for his own works. Later reread various fan letters confirming that I am the leading novelist of my generation. Why is it, one wonders, that my fans are so unusually percipient? Or is it the other way round and do the unusually percipient tend to be my fans? One of life's deeper questions. Must explore further.

21st January: Reread Hamlet by Shakespeare, a competent but unreliable author, though now rather dated and always prone to wordiness. Never to my knowledge managed a novel.

Hamlet is a not uninteresting play, but the plot is flawed. The Danes are really extremely minor royalty, even by Scandinavian standards; scarcely worth a lengthy play. Tremendous hoo-ha in final scenes, characteristic of a particular sort of empty-kettle Dane. Prince Hamlet wouldn't have lasted long in Pratt's, where Danish royalty is taken with a fairly hefty pinch of salt.

"Hamlet," a peculiar name - any relation, one wonders, to the Fotherington-Hamlets of Much Hadham? Much to-ing and fro-ing with ghosts, incest, madness and so forth - always the sign of a writer grasping at straws. I would guess that Shakespeare stole many of his more notable lines from the immortal titles in my own Dance to the Music of Time sequence. But I should hate to pass judgment.

22nd January: I received a telephone call from a Professor Wildenstein at Princeton University. He wanted to give me a large amount of money. This is the sort of thing the Americans do very well. He said that I was to be awarded some literary prize or other worth $50,000 and would I do him the honour, etc, of accepting it. Really the most awful bore, but I suppose one must humour these types. Reluctantly, I accept, wondering why he could not just have posted it to me, without the need for "acceptance".

Needless to say, he was delighted. I have noticed in the past that many Americans pronounce Dance with a sharp a, rather than a long a.

Have others noticed this, too, or is it my novelist's ear? I ask him to send the cheque but, please, no accompanying letter, as these congratulatory missives can prove tedious to plough through.

Reread the poems of W B Yeats.

Very Irish.

Noted that the gentleman who played the drums in the celebrated English popular music group Slade is called Don Powell, suggesting he springs from Spanish nobility. May well be related through the Lloyds of Cordoba (one of whom was a Powell of the Radnorshire house of Holder, which is - intriguingly - also the name of the lead singer). Could also be related by marriage to my sister Margaret, author of Below Stairs and other successful volumes of memoirs.

23rd January: Attended luncheon at Buckingham Palace.

Unexciting guests, mainly philosophers, writers, artists,

with a smattering of politicians and showbusiness types.

Infinitely dreary. Valiantly trying to inject a little life into the gathering, I raise the interesting question of the knee in literature.

"Tolstoy is sparing with his knees, Dickens mentions them only rarely, and Jane Austen not at all," I began.

"Can anyone think of any great knee passage in English literature?"

This question was met by a fascinated silence, so I enlarged upon the point. "It is an aberration of modern times that so often the k in knee is kept silent. It is a perfect example of contemporary vulgarity that so many younger people - television newscaster and so forth - choose to go for the awful pronunciation nee, with a soft k. But I am delighted to say that the upper classes continue to pronounce it with its k intact.

Incidentally, has anyone read the latest Eton College Chronicle? Any good?"

Alas, they were far too dimwitted to tackle such subtle points. By the time I had completed my speech I found they had decamped to a neighbouring room. The wine was Britvic '99. Chateau new to me, slight whiff of orange about it, not at all bad.

Reread complete works of Dostoevsky. Heavy going. He completely misses the essential light touch that he might have picked up had he been born in England and sent to, say, Eton.

Characters lack bounce. But I should hate to pass judgment.

24th January: Reread the latest Burke's Peerage. Very sound on what makes a decent human being, much better in that respect than the Testaments, Old and New, which may well be perfectly good when dealing with Middle-Eastern Royalty - particularly acute on King David and family - but otherwise absurdly overrated, allotting far too much space to Jewish families of little or no significance - shepherds, fishermen, tax collectors, even carpenters - while ignoring many more distinguished families of the time. These include my illustrious forebears, the Pow-Ells of Gomorrah. Ezekiel Pow-Ell was among the most distinguished manufacturers of crosses in his day; one of his companies may well have fashioned the cross that is pivotal to the whole story, yet he is ruthlessly excluded from the text. In my view, the writers of the Gospels made a mistake in concentrating on the rather thin, disruptive (possibly Leftish? Balliol?) character of Lord Jesus Christ (the name implies he was the younger son of a Duke, but I find no mention of him in Burke's) to the exclusion of those from the better families at the wedding feast at Cana.

Reread Huckleberry Finn.

Very American.

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