I’ nevitably regarded as the English Proust,” wrote Norman Shrapnel in the Guardian, to describe Anthony Powell, author of the 12-volume “A Dance to the Music of Time.” Put the emphasis on English, since Powell’s individual works reflect an Anglo Saxon concern with eccentricity and social comedy – not with any profound probing of Bergsonian time.

Powell’s work is pure joy to a biographer, since he revels in the genealogies of his characters and the intricate narratives of their lives. What his characters do in the aftermath of World War I, how they negotiate the rather flaccid period entre-duex-guerres, and how they behaved in World War II, is cause for endless speculation. In Powell, not all is revealed. His narrators, like biographers, are never omniscient.

It seems inevitable that Powell’s one biography deals with John Aubrey, author of one of the first great English biographical works, “Brief Lives” (1667). Aubrey sought to be accurate and lively. His biographical sum-ups, read together, are not so different from Powell’s social comedy. And Powell, a great Tory and ancestor worshipper, believed that in the end the interplay of personalities over time – not plot or an overarching theme – was paramount.

I salute Powell the biographer because he believed in primary research and often chided secondary-source biographers who did not do their homework. Novels were homework as well, since Powell saw fiction as imagination feeding on experience. Literary gamesmen and women could spend their lives, if they chose, hunting down the real-life sources of Powell’s huge cast of characters. He wrote to friends and colleagues asking for help with his characters’ social and professional backgrounds and worked diligently at getting his dialogue and settings just right.

Powell is less flashy than his contemporary Evelyn Waugh – and not as well known in this country – although the cumulative impact of Powell’s work is more impressive, I would say, than Waugh’s. Powell’s relative obscurity (Michael Barber points out) is also due to his refusal to put himself forward. Unlike Waugh, in other words, he did not make a show of himself.

An example of Powell at his best is his novel, “What’s Becoming of Waring?” set in the publishing world (Powell worked at Duckworth for nearly a decade). Waring, a travel writer, has gone missing, and his publisher’s effort to enlist a biographer’s help only makes matters worse.

Michael Barber, on the other hand, is no trouble. He is a delight to read – though he is perhaps best absorbed after dipping into Powell himself. Mr. Barber rarely offers plot summaries or even explanations of what happens in Powell’s novels. But to read Mr. Barber is to be reminded of what fun Powell is.

And Mr. Barber is amusing in his own right: for example, addressing Powell’s reticence and tendency to skip over matters that another autobiographer (Powell wrote four volumes of memoirs) would feel compelled to address. When Powell writes that he had a “lonely … but not unhappy childhood,” the biographer comments: “It is natural to conclude that … he may have left something out.”

Mr. Barber rightly sides against those who reject Powell because he chronicled the comings and goings of the upper classes. Of course Powell was a snob, although his biographer handles the subject and his critics quite sensitively. In my experience, everyone is a snob about something – whether it is bloodlines or the correct way to bake bread. The point is what Powell did with his snobbery, which was to expose the people he knew and imagined to hilarious scrutiny. After all, Henry James argued, one must allow the writer his donne. It is supererogatory to lament that Powell was not a paid-up member of the Labour Party.

Mr. Barber’s command of his subject is remarkable, even though he is unauthorized and was denied access to Powell’s papers, which await the ministrations of his official biographer. Reviewers make quite a to-do about this kind of issue, though in my view the question to ask is whether the biographer understands his subject and has access to enough material to write the kind of biography he proposes. Mr. Barber, who interviewed Powell for the Paris Review, has an impressive sense of what his subject wanted told and what he was determined to withhold. And it is often the case that the authorized biographer can provide more details but not necessarily more insight.

I like the feel of Mr. Barber’s book, and the sense that he is aware of how to manage his own narrative. Thus he writes: “This is probably the place to summarise Powell’s athletic record at Eton.” Rarely does he succumb to that bane of biography, the “must have been” and the “reasonable to suppose,” which are no more than oblique confessions of ignorance.

Sometimes the biographer makes his point without any comment at all – as when he juxtaposes these two comments as epigraphs to Chapter 6, “The Coming Struggle for Power”:

“The voice of the Tempter: ‘Unless you take part in the class struggle you cannot become a major writer.'”

– W. H. Auden

“The real test of a man is the sort of woman he wants to marry.”

– Anthony Powell

To the politically engaged writers of the 1930s, Powell was an irrelevance, if not a reactionary.

Mr. Barber presents fascinating scenes involving George Orwell and Powell, who believed that the former, when they first met, would indeed reject him as a reactionary. Powell was an avid reader of Orwell’s novels and also admired “Homage to Catalonia,” in which Orwell exposed the Stalinists. Perhaps this partly explains why Orwell wrote, “Tony is the only Tory I have ever liked.” Malcolm Muggeridge, a great friend of Powell’s, thought that Orwell’s politics were confused, and that he had more in common with Powell than he realized. Certainly Orwell would not be the first socialist to find in conservatism a crucial truth he could not quite bring to consciousness.

Mr. Barber has the same eye for detail as his subject. He knows that Orwell’s wartime reaction to Powell in his father’s full-dress uniform is telling: “Do your trousers strap under the boot?” Orwell, formerly a policeman in Burma, asked Powell. To Orwell’s satisfaction he learned they did, and he remarked: “Those straps under the feet give you a feeling like nothing else in life.”

As Mr. Barber reports, Powell thought Orwell wore “his shabby clothes with style, hinting at the latent dandyism revealed by his comment about the boot straps.” Mr. Barber goes on to make an observation about a photograph of Orwell at Eton after a swim in the Thames that demonstrates how biography, too, can be a dance to the music of time:

He stands nonchalantly on the bank with his hands in his pockets, a rolled towel under one arm, wearing a floppy sun hat and with an illicit cigarette stuck between his lips. Here, one feels, is another example of the debonair insouciance that made such an impression on Powell.