The New Biography

Lytton Strachey

A work of genius, acknowledged as a landmark in contemporary biography now completely revised and rewritten to tell the FULL story of Strachey, Dora Carrington and Bloomsbury which previous could not be told.

Besides the biographies of Augustus John, Bernard Shaw and Lytton Strachey (which was filmed as Carrington), Michael Holroyd has written two volumes of memoirs, Basil Street Blues and Mosaic. He is the current president of the Royal Society of Literature and 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.

Lytton Strachey, genius, wit, iconoclast, biographer, pacifist, and homosexual campaigner, was at the nexus of the literary and artistic life of Bloomsbury. In the 1960s he was seen as a progenitor of the hippy cult. Now he appears as a far more subversive and challenging figure. He revolutionised the writing of biography and smuggled deviant sexual behaviour into our history in his reassessment of Elizabethan and Victorian times. For this re-telling of his story Holroyd has had access to published and unpublished material unavailable in the 1960s when his biography of Strachey first appeared. In many of Bloomsbury's three-cornered relationships, he had only two sides of the triangle. Now he has all three, and in a new social and political climate can tell the full story of this extraordinary world with candour, sympathy and sexual explicitness. He has cut 100, 000 words, revised much of the text and added a wealth of new material, about Strachey himself, about Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, Rupert Brooke and most vividly about the tragic life of Strachey's companion Dora Carrington.

Augustus John

The revised 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.

Superb biography. . . . Holroyd has it all

Vastly informative and hugely entertaining

An entertaining, essentially comic story... Holroyd tells it with great skill and elegance

Here is one of the most entertaining lives ever written... Holroyd depicts his subjects with great sympathy and understanding... Very funny... thought-provoking

Both a celebration and a tragedy. The celebration of a man of enormous vitality, intermittent zest and remarkable magnetism, and of the most naturally gifted artist that the English-speaking world has produced in the last hundred years; and the tragedy of a man who never came to terms with himself... A wonderfully engrossing, entertaining and even moving book

Besides the biographies of Augustus John, Bernard Shaw and Lytton Strachey (which was filmed as Carrington), 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.

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 vigor 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 signaling the end of a distant era.

Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers

A Book of Secrets

A masterfully atmospheric book of hidden lives and family secrets from the celebrated biographer

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.

Here, he has given us the distilled essence of biography and a fitting end to what he evokes as "the comedy of life".

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

A small gem of humanity, curiosity and observation with a wonderful, rolling undercurrent of comedy

Scintillating... Holroyd's book is a sly, inconclusive and utterly bewitching dance through the elusive narrative echoes that make up the biographer's art

[The book] displays all the wisdom of a long life in a story linking the author with the lives of three extraordinary women connected over the centuries by an opulent Amalfi Coast villa

Psychologies Magazine - Mariella Frostrup

Humane and sensitive, his book glows with the energy of lives restored, reanimated and celebrated

A sly meditation on the biographer's art from a master of the genre

An accomplished biographer's tale, with a roaming narrative and many incidental pleasures on the way

Besides the Lives of Augustus John, Bernard Shaw and Lytton Strachey (which was filmed as Carrington), Michael Holroyd has written two volumes of memoirs, Basil Street Blues and Mosaic. His most recent book, A Strange Eventful History, winner of the James Tait Black Prize, was a biography of two great theatrical dynasties which included Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, and her son Edward Gordon Craig. He has been president of the Royal Society of Literature and is the first non-fiction writer to have been awarded the British Literature Prize. He lives in London and Somerset with his wife, the novelist Margaret Drabble.

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.

Basil Street Blues and Mosaic

This enchanting collection by James Tait Black Award winning biographer Michael Holroyd contains his two volumes of memoir - Basil Street Blues and Mosaic 
 
As read on BBC Radio 4

Basil Street Blues is an extraordinary piece of work...a classic piece of English autobiography

Fine, funny and touching...[Basil Street Blues is] an original, unforgettable book

A brilliant writer blessed with prefect pitch...there could be no more sympathetic and funny companion with whom to go into the jungle of genealogy than Holroyd

Michael Holroyd is one of the greatest biographers of our age... [Mosaic] is an absolute tour de force of brilliant writing

[Mosaic] is marvellous because the autobiographer is in fact a master-biographer

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.

The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their Remarkable Families

A Strange Eventful History

'All theatre enthusiasts are indebted to Henry Irving and Ellen Terry: and now also to Michael Holroyd for bringing their families back to dazzling life' - Sir Ian McKellen

Holroyd has a wonderful eye for detail...an entirely captivating biography...one of the glories of the form

It has all the tumbling narrative, spicy detail and easy empathy that determine his midas touch... shows Holroyd yet again pushing the biographer's art to new imaginative planes

Magnificent - not just as a fascinating exercise in group biography, but as a masterpiece of comic writing...such joie de vivre

This is a fabulous cavalcade of a book, written with infectious verve and deep imaginative sympathy ... a joy to read

Michael Holroyd has once again triumphed over a seemingly impossible subject. For so capacious is this tale of two great actors and their descendants that he has written a sweeping social history of theatre in the late 19th and early 20th-century England. Deftly plotted, with an infectious verve that springs from his delight in the waywardness of human nature

Through a rapidly evolving, scene-changing narrative, presented with a range of eye-catching effects Holroyd evokes the mysterious world of the Victorian and Edwardian theatre, the hiss of the gas footlights, the coloured lights and smoke, with all the attention to detail of the star-struck fan seated in the front stalls

He writes with eloquence and clarity, sketching the broader context with a light but firm touch and incidentally providing a literary masterclass in the marshalling and sifting of detail

'[Holroyd's] own uncanny powers of balance, perception and penetration [appear] in a multiple biography that somehow recaptures an ephemeral imaginative reality more intense to its subjects and their public than life itself

Holroyd's sweeping biography...proceeds at a furious pace, and, in less expert hands, the detail packed onto the page might bewilder; instead, the effect is of an epic, perfectly balanced by intimacies of setting and character.

A fabulous cavalcade of a book, written with infectious verve

To attempt the biography of even one of these giants of the 19th Century English stage would be a challenge to most, but the energetic Michael Holroyd tackles both...Amazingly he carried it off in a ripping yarn spiced with melodrama and tinged with pathos

Holroyd's charmingly modest intention is to "carry readers back in time and convey a sense of adventure and intimacy with the past". In this he triumphantly succeeds

Henry Irving - a merchant's clerk who became the saviour of British theatre - and Ellen Terry, who made her first theatre appearance as soon as she could walk, were the king and queen of the Victorian stage. Creatively interdependent, they founded a power-house of arts at the Lyceum Theatre, with Bram Stoker as business manager, where they recast Shakespeare's plays on an epic scale and took the company on lucrative and exhilarating international tours. 
 
In his masterly new biography, award-winning writer Michael Holroyd explores their public and private lives, showing how their artistic legacy and their brilliant but troubled children came to influence the modern world.

Michael Holroyd

Holroyd’s elegant little essays are a pleasure to read...these are witty, quotable jeux d’esprit

A great Christmas present for those hurtling towards their driving test… A subtle delight

Jolly, illustrated salute to the cars in his own life and the lives he has biographised in a long literary career. Lovely. Toot! Toot!

A delightful memoir-cum-social history which is wry, self-deprecating and anything but stuffy… his elegant musings provide an ideal festive pick-me-up, compact enough to fit in a stocking, and packing enough pep to burn any rival off the road

Michael Holroyd, esteemed and genial doyen of literary biographers, has wheels. Decades of dedication to literature and the life of the mind have at least raised his consciousness to the level at which he discerns the shaping presence of motorism in his own life and those of his biographical subjects… I can only rejoice

A companionable book, made to be raced through in one sitting

This is a great little addition to his existing volumes of memoir

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 also had their difficulties: Bernard Shaw drove with reckless gusto when overtaking his eightieth year; Vita Sackville-West’s car became a chamber for sudden romantic assignations and getaways; while Augustus John and his family careered through vulnerable villages as the poor vehicle, piled high with bohemian friends, 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 perceptive, Michael Holroyd finds surprising ways to understand the past and challenge our view of the future.

Michael Holroyd

Praise for On Wheels

A charming book...elegantly written

Holroyd’s elegant little essays are a pleasure to read...these are witty, quotable jeux d’esprit

A great Christmas present for those hurtling towards their driving test… A subtle delight

A charming book...elegantly written

Holroyd’s elegant little essays are a pleasure to read...these are witty, quotable jeux d’esprit

A great Christmas present for those hurtling towards their driving test… A subtle delight

A charming book...elegantly written

Holroyd’s elegant little essays are a pleasure to read...these are witty, quotable jeux d’esprit

A great Christmas present for those hurtling towards their driving test… A subtle delight

Books by Michael Holroyd

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