New Releases by Michael Holroyd

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.

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.

Works on Paper is a selection by one of today''s leading biographers from his lectures, essays, and reviews written over the last quarter of a century—mainly on the craft of biography and autobiography, but also covering what Michael Holroyd describes as his "enthusiasms and alibis". Opening with a startling attack on biography, which is answered by two essays on the ethics and values of non–fiction writing, the book goes on to examine 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 internecine 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.

From the bestselling author of A Book of Secrets, a brisk, charming, illustrated account of a motoring life As a child, Michael Holroyd spent his best hours in his family''s cramped garage, which contained a wealth of magical, exciting objects. But the most intriguing by far was the one in the middle of the room—the family''s eight-horsepower black Ford, which had found in the garage a permanent home and in Holroyd a dedicated caretaker. Sitting in the backseat—his own private castle—he began his love affair with the automobile. On Wheels is the story of the cars and drivers that inspired and affected Holroyd throughout his life. Ranging from drives around the country with his father, a car obsessive, to the baroque horrors of his austere driving instructor, to the liberating pleasures of automatic transmission, On Wheels is an automotive autobiography—the story of times and places that mattered to the author, told through the cars that bore witness. "My biographies," Holroyd writes, "became increasingly filled with motoring exploits—something of which I was unaware until recently," and so On Wheels is also a reflection on the author''s many brilliant biographical subjects—Bernard Shaw, Lytton Strachey, and many others—and their own relationships to the open road. Casually intimate and often riotously funny, On Wheels is a master biographer''s miniature self-portrait—and an indelible reflection on his great passion.

On a hill above the Italian village of Ravello sits the Villa Cimbrone, a place of fantasy and make-believe. The characters who move through Holroyd''s new book are destined never to meet, yet the Villa Cimbrone and one man unite them all.

"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

A love story, a detective story, a book of secrets, a beautifully written journey into a forest of family trees. After writing the definitive biographies of Lytton Strachey and George Bernard Shaw, Michael Holroyd turned his hand to a more personal subject: his own family. The result was Basil Street Blues, published in 1999. But rather than the story being over, it was in fact only beginning. As letters from readers started to pour in, the author discovered extraordinary narratives that his own memoir had only touched on. Mosaic is Holroyd''s piecing together of these remarkable stories: the murder of the fearsome headmaster of his school; the discovery that his Swedish grandmother was the mistress of the French anarchist Jacques Prévert; and a letter about the beauty of his mother that provides a clue to a decade-long affair. Funny, touching, and wry, Mosaic shows how other people''s lives, however eccentric or extreme, echo our own dreams and experiences.

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.

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

''Mosaic'' is Michael Holroyd''s second volume of family memoirs which relates to but is independent of ''Basil Street Blues''. The work begins with the author trying to make sense of his aunt''s labyrinthian financial affairs, then moves onto Holroyd searching for a missing relative and uncovering his family tree.

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.

Elle a vingt-deux ans, elle est peintre, fantaisiste et un peu sauvageonne. Il a trente-cinq ans, il est écrivain, il a fait scandale en attaquant avec virulence l''hypocrisie de l''Angleterre victorienne. Il est homosexuel. Il s''appelle Lytton Strachey, elle s''appelle Nora Carrington. Ils se rencontrent en 1915 à la campagne, chez Virginia Woolf. Jusqu''à la mort de l''écrivain, ils vont connaître une passion partagée, n''excluant pas de multiples aventures. Et Nora ne pourra survivre à son amant... Autour de ce couple exceptionnel, que fait revivre le film " Carrington " mis en scène par Christopher Hampton, Michael Holroyd, biographe à succès d''Oscar Wilde et de G.B. Shaw, nous plonge au cœur de l''Angleterre intellectuelle de l''entre-deux-guerres, celle du cercle de Blomsbury où les amoures sont aussi libres que les idées, où nous croisons les silhouettes d''Aldous Huxley et Katherine Mansfield, de Bertrand Russel et de D.H. Lawrence... Un monde étincelant et l''une des plus belles histoires d''amour de la littérature.

This work is the third of three volumes on the life of Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), covering the last half of the 19th century. It opens with the United Kingdom''s General Election campaign of 1918, and gradually reveals Shaw as conjuror, fabulist and seer. Here is Shaw in old age, a mysterious comic, but above all one of the greatest men of letters of this century.

[V.1]. "He was "Sonny," the unloved child who grew up in a ménage-à-trois. He was "G.B.S.," the public eccentric and relentlessly articulate playwright, critic, and socialist pamphleteer who presented himself as a great man long before he had achieved greatness. He was Bernard Shaw (he detested the name "George"), the complex and evasive man who invaded other people''s marriages and conducted romances by mail but didn''t marry until his forties. Fifteen years in the writing and deftly marshaling an enormous body of research, Bernard Shaw : The Search for Love captures the early life of this brilliant and multifarious man of ideas with humor, compassion, and startling acuity."--Cover.

When Michael Holroyd''s multivolume life of Bernard Shaw was published, it was hailed as a masterpiece, and William Golding predicted that it would take its place "among the great biographies." Now the biography is available for the first time in a lively and accessible abridgment by the author. This is the quintessence of Shaw. The narrative has a new verve and pace, and the light and shade of Shaw''s world are more dramatically revealed as Holroyd counterpoints the private and public Shaw with inimitable insight and scholarship. Playwright, wit, socialist, polemicist, vegetarian, and irresistible charmer, Bernard Shaw was the most controversial literary figure of his age, the scourge of Victorian values and middle-class pretensions. Born in Dublin in 1856, he grew up there, a lonely child in an unsettling menage a trois. His father, George Carr Shaw, had turned to drink, and his mother was muse to a Svengali-like music teacher whom she followed to London. The young Shaw, anxious to escape his heritage, also left for London to reinvent himself as the legendary G.B.S.--novelist, lover, politician, music critic, and finally playwright. From his first passionate affair with a beautiful middle-aged widow, he moved on to flirtations and liaisons with young actresses and socialists before finally settling into marriage in 1898. At the turn of the century, Shaw was in his prime, a theatrical impresario and author of those great campaigning plays--Man and Superman, Major Barbara, The Doctor''s Dilemma, and John Bull''s Other Island--that used laughter as an anesthetic for the operation he performed on British society. By 1914 the author of Pygmalion was the most popular writer in England, and increasingly recognized throughout Europe and America. Though ready with advice to others on how to stay married, he fell painfully in love with two of the most dazzling actresses of the age, Ellen Terry and Mrs. Patrick Campbell. The reluctant recipient of a Nobel Prize for literature and an Academy Award for his screenplay for Pygmalion, Shaw became an international icon between the two world wars, feted from China and Soviet Russia to India and New Zealand, though still contriving to provoke the establishment in the United States, South Africa, and Ireland. In old age he was vigorous and prolific, espousing many new and quixotic causes. He revealed himself increasingly as conjurer, fabulist, and seer through his powerful late works, including Saint Joan, the Chekhovian Heartbreak House, the modernist fantasy Back to Methuselah, and the imaginative dream plays and political extravaganzas. Covering almost a century, from 1856 to 1950, this unparalleled life of Shaw presents the magnificent double portrait of an age and of a man who was born fifty years too soon. Holroyd magically captures the essence of Shaw''s protean genius in a tragicomedy that