Basil Street Blues
1999
First Published
3.76
Average Rating
352
Number of Pages
"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 16 pages of photographs
Avg Rating
3.76
Number of Ratings
116
5 STARS
24%
4 STARS
39%
3 STARS
26%
2 STARS
11%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads
Author
Michael Holroyd
Author · 17 books
Michael Holroyd is the author of acclaimed biographies of George Bernard Shaw, the painter Augustus John, Lytton Strachey, and Ellen Terry and Henry Irving, as well as two memoirs, Basil Street Blues and Mosaic. Knighted for his services to literature, he is the president emeritus of the Royal Society of Literature and the only nonfiction writer to have been awarded the David Cohen British Prize for Literature. His previous book, A Strange Eventful History, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography in 2009. He lives in London with his wife, the novelist Margaret Drabble. http://us.macmillan.com/author/michae...
