Basil Street Blues (46 page)
Read Basil Street Blues Online
Authors: Michael Holroyd
"A man whose art rested as much upon the exercise of intelligence could not have chosen a more intelligent biographer."
The Times
B
ASIL
S
TREET
B
LUES
A subtle, courageous book...
Sunday Telegraph
[Holroyd] has written an original, unforgettable book
Daily Telegraph
Tense, fraught, uneasy, but mining that unease to poignant effect, Basil Street Blues is an extraordinary piece of work
TLS
I have no hesitation in awarding
Basil Street Blues
the full five stars. In the genre of autobiography, it is right up there in my personal pantheon...[a] haunting and beautifully understated tragi-comedy.
Mail on Sunday
A B
OOK
OF
S
ECRETS
"A subtle paean to the art of biography. It is a biographical experiment, but a deeply humane and sensitive one. It glows with the energy of lives investigated, restored, reanimated and celebrated."
Sunday Times
"Here, he has given us the distilled essence of biography and a fitting end to what he evokes as ‘the comedy of life’."
Observer
"As is always the case with Holroyd, the reader comes away equally inspired, equally curious, and lavishly entertained by a story-teller of the first rank."
Scotsman
"A small gem of humanity, curiosity and observation with a wonderful, rolling undercurrent of comedy"
Sunday Telegraph
"Scintillating... Holroyd’s book is a sly, inconclusive and utterly bewitching dance through the elusive narrative echoes that make up the biographer’s art"
Metro
M
OSAIC
" A lovely blend of mirth and melancholy…
this memoir ranks with the finest records of the period"
Waterstones Books Quarterly
"An absolute tour de force of brilliant writing."
Telegraph
"Holroyd is a marvellously sour wit and an observer who never misses a good detail, even in extremis."
Sunday Times
"Mosaic is restless, interrogative, hungry for knowledge and resolution.”
Guardian
Besides the biographies of Augustus John, Bernard Shaw and Lytton Strachey, Michael Holroyd has written two volumes of memoirs,
Basil Street Blues
and
Mosaic
. He was president of the Royal Society of Literature from 2003–2008 and is the only non-fiction writer to have been awarded the British Literature Prize. He lives in London and Somerset with his wife, the novelist Margaret Drabble.
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.
Basil Street Blues
is available
here
.
‘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. A love story, a detective story, a book of secrets, Mosaic is both a beautifully written journey into a forest of family trees, and a fascinating insight into the workings of genealogy.
Mosaic
is available
here
.
A Book of Secrets
is a masterfully atmospheric treasure-trove of hidden lives, uncelebrated achievements and family mysteries. Acclaimed biographer Michael Holroyd peers into dusty corners to bring a company of unknown women into the light; Alice Keppel was the mistress of both the second Lord Grimthorpe and the Prince of Wales; Eve Fairfax was Lord Grimthorpe’s abandoned fiancée and sometime muse of Auguste Rodin; and the novelist Violet Trefusis was the lover of Vita Sackville-West. Taking the reader on a journey of discovery from Ravello to Paris, from Kirkstall Grange in Yorkshire to Vita Sackville-West’s home at Knole,
A Book of Secrets
lucidly gives voice to fragile human connections.
A Book of Secrets
is available
here
.
Playwright, wit, socialist, polemicist, vegetarian and charmer, Bernard Shaw was a controversial literary figure, the scourge of Victorian values and middle-class pretensions.
This is Michael Holroyd’s essential biography of George Bernard Shaw for the general reader, with its pace and verve, its comedy, drama and politics, it shows a provocative and paradoxical figure sympathetically and movingly portrayed.
Bernard Shaw
is available
here
.
When Michael Holroyd’s life of Strachey first appeared in the late 1960s, it was hailed as a landmark in contemporary biography. Drawing on new material, published and unpublished, Holroyd completely revised and rewrote his masterwork in 1995 to tell the full story of this complex man and his world as it could not be told while many of Strachey’s friends and lovers were still alive.
At the heart of the story is the poignant liaison between Strachey and the painter Dora Carrington. A panorama of the social, literary, political and sexual life of a generation,
Lytton Strachey
reverberates in the mind like a great novel.
Lytton Strachey
is available
here
.
This 1997 revised and updated biography of the celebrated artist, using the mass of new material which has come to light since Holroyd’s two-volume first edition in the mid 1970s, reveals the complete story of John and his circle, from one of our great biographers.
John studied at the Slade with his sister Gwen before both of them went to Paris. He lived and worked at feverish speed and his drawings were astonishing for their fluid lyrical line, their vigour and spontaneity. His life became a complex tale of two cities, London and Paris, of two wives and many families. ‘The age of Augustus John was dawning,’ Virginia Woolf wrote of the year 1908, which saw many portraits of writers and artists and small glowing oil panels of figures in a landscape. His most striking work was done in the years before the First World War and when he died in 1961 his death was treated as a landmark signalling the end of a distant era.
Augustus John
is available
here
.
