Powell did eventually reveal himself in four volumes of memoirs, published between 1976 and 1982. This edition of To Keep the Ball Rolling is an abridged and revised version of those volumes, never before published in this form in the United States. A fascinating view of Powell as a man and an author, his memoirs are also a unique history of British literary society and the social elite Powell moved within from the twenties through the eighties. From Eton and Oxford to his life as a novelist and critic, Powell observes all -- the obscenity trial sparked by Lady Chatterley's Lover, Shirley Temple's libel suit after Graham Greene reviewed Wee Willie Winkie "with even more than his usual verve" -- and paints vivid portraits of Kingsley Amis, V.S. Naipaul, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and countless others. Most importantly, Powell's lively memoirs banish all thought of the man as a relic of the British gentry. He was a modernist, a Tory, and more than a little interested in genealogy and peerage, but he was also a man who, according to Ferdinand Mount, "miraculously knew what life was like".