Basil Street Blues - Hardcover

Holroyd, Michael

3.76

103 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393048500 ISBN 13: 9780393048506

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 2000

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A celebrated biographer focuses on his own life, peeling back the layers on his "ordinary" British family to discover evidence of fatal fires, suicides, bankruptcies, divorces, unrequited love, nobility, and much more.

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Review:

The distinguished biographer of Lytton Strachey and Bernard Shaw turns his trained eye on his kin in a thoughtful work that is as much a meditation on the nature of biography as a family memoir. Basil Street Blues has its origins in recollections Michael Holroyd asked his parents to write in the late 1970s, long after their 12-year marriage had ended. They agreed about little, not even the date of their son's birth in 1935, and Holroyd probes these discrepancies with the same brisk lucidity he has brought to subjects less intimately connected to his own life. Readers accustomed to the woe-is-me authorial stance frequently assumed in currently fashionable memoirs of familial dysfunction will be surprised by the impartial sympathy and considerable humor with which Holroyd depicts the financial, social, and sexual missteps of his parents, grandparents, and other relatives. Perhaps it's Anglo-Saxon stoicism inherited from his British father, perhaps the Scandinavian fatalism of his Swedish mother, but Holroyd has an impressive ability to view even his own youthful unhappiness with calm detachment. His elegantly written chronicle of "secret episodes and half-suspected dramas" nicely achieves its declared purpose: "to pare back a little the cuticle of time and to apply the research methods I have learnt as a biographer to my own life." --Wendy Smith

About the Author:

Michael Holroyd is one of the most celebrated biographers of this century. Among his books are biographies of Lytton Strachey and Augustus John, and the landmark biography of Bernard Shaw, which was a bestseller in both America and Britain. He lives in London.

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