Work
Powell came to work in London during the autumn of 1926, renting rooms in Shepherd Market. He lived at various London addresses for the next 25 years. He worked in a form of apprenticeship at the publishers Gerald Duckworth and Company in Covent Garden, leaving their employ in 1932 after protracted negotiations about title, salary, and working hours. He next took a job as a script writer at the Warner Brothers Studio in Teddington, where he remained for six months. He made an abortive attempt to find employment in Hollywood as a screenwriter in 1937. He next found work reviewing novels for The Daily Telegraph and memoirs and autobiographies for The Spectator.
Upon the outbreak of World War II, Powell joined his regiment as a Second Lieutenant at the age of 34, more than ten years older than most of his fellow subalterns, not at all well prepared and lacking in experience. His superiors found uses for his talents, resulting in a series of transfers that brought him special training courses designed to produce a nucleus of officers to deal with the problems of military government after the Allies had defeated the Axis powers. He eventually secured an assignment with the Intelligence Corps and additional training. His military career continued with assignment to the War Office in Whitehall, where he was attached to the section known as Military Intelligence (Liaison), and later—for a short time—to the Cabinet Office to serve on the Secretariat of the Joint Intelligence Committee, securing promotions along the way.
Returning to Military Intelligence (Liaison), in the War Office, he had responsibility for dealings with the Czechs, later with the Belgians and Luxembourgers, and later still the French. In November 1944, Powell acted as assistant escorting officer to a group of fourteen Allied military attachés taken to France and Belgium to see something of the campaign.
After his demobilization at the end of the war, writing became his sole career.
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Famous quotes containing the word work:
“The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.”
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“A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips;Mnot be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient man’s thought becomes a modern man’s speech.”
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