Learning to drive was no easy matter for the author: the lessons required military precision when practising how to get in and out of his car correctly. Weaving together memoir and historical anecdote, this title traces his relationship with cars through a lifetime of biography.
A continuation of the memoir Basil Street Blues follows the murder of a fearsome headmaster, a discovery about the author's Swedish grandmother's identity, and a letter that reveals details about his mother's long-time affair. 13,000 first printing.
Michael Holroyd is a distinguished biographer, but was never interested in exploring his own family's history until his parents died in the 1980s. This encouraged him to find out more about his parents, their stories, and their origins.
A wonderful offbeat memoir.... Holroyd has written perhaps his best book yet."—Ben Macintyre, New York Times Book Review Renowned biographer Michael Holroyd had always assumed that his own family was perfectly English, or at least perfectly ordinary. But an investigation into the Holroyd past—guided by old photograph albums, crumbling documents, and his parents' wildly divergent accounts of their lives—gradually yields clues to a constellation of startling events and eccentric characters: a slow decline from English nobility on one side, a dramatic Scandinavian ancestry on the other. Fires, suicides, bankruptcies, divorces, unconsummated longings, and the rumor of an Indian tea fortune permeate this wry, candid memoir, "part multiple biography, part autobiography, but principally an oblique investigation of the biographer's art" (New York Times Book Review). "[A] perfect example of a memoir that entrances me."—Katherine A. Powers, Boston Sunday Globe "[O]ne of the few [biographers] who can convey what makes ordinary as well as extraordinary mortals live in our minds."—Los Angeles Times
The author shares the stories of unknown women who played significant roles in the lives of prominent figures, including a mistress shared by the second Lord Grimthorpe and the Prince of Wales, a creative muse of Auguste Rodin, and a novelist lover of Vita Sackville-West.
Michael Holroyd, perhaps the most distinguished of contemporary biographers, has in recent years turned his attention to the stories hidden within his own fascinating (not to say eccentric) family. In Ancestors in the Attic he teases out two especially intriguing episodes, the tales of his great-grandmother and his aunt: which he categorizes respectively as tragedy and comedy. As well as telling their stories in words, he does it visually, through two very different collections made by the women, which he discovered, long after their deaths, in the attic of a house in Maidenhead: the ferns preserved and stitched into beautiful, intricate patterns by his tragic great-grandmother in the 1870s; and the photographs of silent movie actors collected by his lively young aunt in the 1920s. This handsome cloth-bound boxed set contains two volumes - My Great Grandmother's Book of Ferns and My Aunt's Book of Silent Actors - and is a delightful celebration of the appeal of collecting, as well as a fascinating record of a unique family history.
Michael Holroyd opens with a startling attack on biography, which is answered by two essays on the ethics and values of non-fiction writing. The book then examines the work of several contemporary biographers, the place of biography in fiction and of fiction in biography, and the revelations of some extravagant autobiographers, from Osbert Sitwell to Quentin Crisp - to which he adds some adventures of his own, in particular an important and unpublished piece THE MAKING OF GBS, a riveting story of deadly literary warfare. The book ends with a series of satires, celebrations, apologias and polemics which throw light not only on Michael Holroyd's progress as a biographer, but also his record as an embattled campaigner in the field of present-day literary politics.
PLEASE NOTE: THIS EBOOK DOES NOT CONTAIN PHOTOS INCLUDED IN THE PRINT EDITION. Deemed "a prodigy among biographers" by The New York Times Book Review, Michael Holroyd transformed biography into an art. Now he turns his keen observation, humane insight, and epic scope on an ensemble cast, a remarkable dynasty that presided over the golden age of theater. Ellen Terry was an ethereal beauty, the child bride of a Pre-Raphaelite painter who made her the face of the age. George Bernard Shaw was so besotted by her gifts that he could not bear to meet her, lest the spell she cast from the stage be broken. Henry Irving was an ambitious, harsh-voiced merchant's clerk, but once he painted his face and spoke the lines of Shakespeare, his stammer fell away to reveal a magnetic presence. He would become one of the greatest actor-managers in the history of the theater. Together, Terry and Irving created a powerhouse of the arts in London's Lyceum Theatre, with Bram Stoker—who would go on to write Dracula—as manager. Celebrities whose scandalous private lives commanded global attention, they took America by stormin wildly popular national tours. Their all-consuming professional lives left little room for their brilliant but troubled children. Henry's boys followed their father into the theater but could not escape the shadow of his fame. Ellen's feminist daughter, Edy, founded an avant-garde theater and a largely lesbian community at her mother's country home. But it was Edy's son, the revolutionary theatrical designer Edward Gordon Craig, who possessed the most remarkable gifts and the most perplexing inability to realize them. A now forgotten modernist visionary, he collaborated with the Russian director Stanislavski on a production of Hamlet that forever changed the way theater was staged. Maddeningly self-absorbed, he inherited his mother's potent charm and fathered thirteen children by eight women, including a daughter with the dancer Isadora Duncan. An epic story spanning a century of cultural change, A Strange Eventful History finds space for the intimate moments of daily existence as well as the bewitching fantasies played out by its subjects. Bursting with charismatic life, it is an incisive portrait of two families who defied the strictures of their time. It will be swiftly recognized as a classic. Please note: This ebook edition does not contain photos and illustrations that appeared in the print edition.
A triumphant success. . . . His prose is confident, clear . . . occasionally perfect." —Dennis Potter, The Times (London) "It is impossible to suppose that this ‘Life' will ever be superseded . . . the best literary biography to appear for many years."—John Rothenstein, New York Times "Written with vivacity and scrupulousness. . . . [Michael Holroyd] has a great novelist's sense of the obstinate mystery of the human person."—George Steiner, The New Yorker
Holroyd pieces together several remarkable stories to create a wry, touching mosaic of his family, including the murder of his fearsome headmaster and the discovery that his Swedish grandmother was the mistress of a French anarchist.
The rvised and updated biography of the British painter, drawing on the mass of new material which has come to light since Holroyd's first edition in 1974, revealing the complete story of John and his circle, from one of the greatest modern biographers. Born in Tenby in 1878, Augustus John studied at the Slade with his sister Gwen, and in Paris. He lived a passionate and unruly life and died in 1961. Using new material, new correspondence and drawing on numerous new studies of Gwen John, Eplstein and others, Michael Holroyd can now tell the full and true stories behind the life of this archetypal bohemian and artist-reprobate. Proto-feminist subplots involving Gwen, Ida and Dorelia John (his wife) also bring the book thoroughly up to date for the 1990s reader.
Michael Holroyd – the most famous biographer in Britain – turns his attention upon himself and his own family in Basil Street Blues (the title comes from the Basil Street Hotel where the author was conceived in the 1930s). Born into a family rich in eccentricity, Holroyd was largely brought up by his grandparents in Maidenhead because his exotic Swedish mother and reserved English father couldn't stand living together. (His grandparents' marriage provided no better model – his grandfather having had a four-year affair with a woman he met at a bus stop before coming back to his grandmother). Towards the end of Holroyd's parents' lives he persuaded them to write their own stories and using the results, plus his own memories and researches he has written this moving and self-revealing book.
When Michael Holroyd published 'Basil Street Blues', in which one of our finest biographers turned his attentions to his own family, it was the beginning of a story rather than an end. For as the letters from readers started to arrive, the author discovered an extraordinary narrative that his own memoir had only touched upon. 'Mosaic' is Michael's piecing together of these remarkable revelations: some of which are pleasant surprises, others more startling. A love story, a detective story, a book of secrets, this is a beautifully written journey into a forest of family trees.
This is a book about surprises - at any rate, it has surprised me.'In 1999, Michael Holroyd published Basil Street Blues, in which one of our finest biographers turned his attentions to something more personal - his own family. But rather than the story being over, in fact it was just beginning. For as the letters from readers started to arrive, the author discovered an extraordinary narrative that his own memoir had only touched upon. Mosaic, then, is Michael Holroyd's piecing together of these remarkable stories: some of which are pleasant surprises, other more startling. There is the death of the fearsome headmaster at his school, who was murdered by one of the boys after he left: the discovery that his Swedish grandmother was the mistress of the French anarchist writer Jacques Prevert; and a letter from Margaret Forster about the beauty of his mother, that leads to his remarkable account of a decade-long affair.
Captivatingly fresh and intimate letters from Augustus John's first wife, Ida, reveal the untold story of married life with one of the great artists of the last century. Twelve days before her twenty-fourth birthday, on the foggy morning of Saturday 12 January 1901, Ida Nettleship married Augustus John in a private ceremony at St Pancras Registry Office. The union went against the wishes of Ida's parents, who aspired to an altogether more conventional match for their eldest daughter. But Ida was in love with Augustus, a man of exceptional magnetism also studying at the Slade, and who would become one of the most famous artists of his time. Ida's letters – to friends, to family and to Augustus – reveal a young woman of passion, intensity and wit. They tell of the scandal she brought on the Nettleship family and its consquences; of hurt and betrayal as the marriage evolved into a three-way affair when Augustus fell in love with another woman, Dorelia; of Ida's remarkable acceptance of Dorelia, their pregnancies and shared domesticity; of self-doubt, happiness and despair; and of finding the strength and courage to compromise and navigate her unorthodox marriage. Ida is a naturally gifted writer, and it is with a candour, intimacy and social intelligence extraordinary for a woman of her period that her correspondence opens up her world. Ida John died aged just thirty of puerperal fever following the birth of her fifth son, but in these vivid, funny and sometimes devastatingly sad letters she is startlingly alive on the page; a young woman ahead of her time – almost of our own time – living a complex and compelling drama here revealed for the first time by the woman at its very heart.
As read on BBC Radio 4 Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography for A Strange Eventful History and winner of the Lifetime Services to Biography Award. Michael Holroyd is one of the finest biographers of our time yet he was never interested in exploring his own family's history until the death of his parents in the 1980s. Then, faced with a sudden vacuum, he felt a desire to fill it with the stories of their lives. Basil Street Blues, the first of his volumes of memoir, is part detective story, part family memoir and part an oblique voyage of self-discovery which is both startlingly comic and profoundly moving. In his follow-up volume, Mosaic, he delves deeper into his family history. Witty, touching and wry, Mosaic shows the strange interconnectedness of our lives, and how other people's stories, however eccentric or extreme, echo our own dreams and experiences. These two volumes - published together for the first time here - form an extraordinary piece of writing, and an enthralling lesson in identity and perspective for both author and reader.
Michael Holroyd confronts an army of automobiles in this charming book. Weaving together memoir and historical anecdote, he traces his relationship with cars through a lifetime of biography. LEarning to drive was no easy matter for Michael: the lessons required military precision when practising how to get in and out of his car correctly. His biographical subjects too had their difficulties: Bernard Shaw drove with reckless gusto; Vita Sackville-West's carbecame a chamber for romantic assinations; while Augustus John stuttered and jerked along in first gear. Wry, thoughtful and very funny. On Wheels is an elegy to the glamour of the car. Subtle and pereceptive, Michael Holroyd finds surprising ways to understand the past and challenge our view of the future.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.