Michael Holroyd

A fascinating and entertaining book about an eccentric and colorful family. There were multiple divorces, remarriages, estrangements that were interesting to me because they were different from my family. His father was a failure at various enterprises and was a sad character in many ways; his mother was glamorous and meeting new men into her middle age, though she died relatively young, of cancer. Holroyd has an interestingly detached way of describing it all, but seems happy in his current show more life (married to Margaret Drabble and living in separate houses, which sounds perfect). show less

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just got this. Years ago I read the original which was published in 1971. It was hugely controversial because it revealed what a polymorphously perverse bunch the Bloomsburies were. I was completely smitten by Carrington who was surely a flower child thirty years too early. Anyhow, time passed and it became more acceptable to reveal details of people's sexuality, and what with Lytton being gay and all, Holroyd dug up so much extra info that he got to the point where he knew he show more should rewrite his monster bio. So he did. I look forward to reacquainting myself with Lytton who is a completely endearing character.
Mr. Holroyd's biography was clearly a revelation whose moment had come. The Swinging 60's saw in Bloomsbury's adamant rejection of convention and in its polymorphous carryings-on a model for its own liberation. Mr. Holroyd's book, along with Quentin Bell's biography of Virginia Woolf, was responsible for igniting the mania for Bloomsbury that has fueled an apparently inexhaustible stream of memoirs, published letters and diaries, plays and academic treatises excavating the private lives of Vita and Virginia, Leonard, Vanessa, Clive, Duncan, Maynard, Carrington, Roger and a host of minor satellites, children and grandchildren.

Michael Holroyd has, in his new version of "Lytton Strachey," interlarded a great deal of this new material, along with disclosures that he says he was prevented from making in the earlier because many of Lytton's friends and lovers were still alive. In some cases, he had the disturbing experience of finding that he had misread events or relationships.

Long books like this can be hard to read, one keeps putting them down and doing something else and procrastination over a book one is actually engrossed in and enjoying is odd but that is the case with this book. I am pleased to have had the chance to reread it and part of why I took my time and didn't skim and underlined and researched bits was...at my age....I am unlikely to read it again so had to savor it this time. show less

Engrossing and researched thoroughly, I can only praise this biography as a classic in its field. This is "The New Biography", a rewrite of Holroyd's original from 1976. It is the result of retrieving much additional correspondence, formerly held by private collectors.
Augustus John's reputation, once so high in his gifted early years, has declined because, Holroyd writes, "(of) the difficulty critics and historians have when treating individual talents that do not fit into ideological or show more narrative patterns."
This is not an art history book but an attempt to recreate a world which invites the reader to "enter, and where, interpreting messages from the past, they may experience feelings and thoughts that remain with them after the book is closed". show less

Mostly talking about writing biographies, the author draws on his own experiences to describe some of the more famous biographers and their books. Well written, informative, and funny (Giles Lytton Strachey long deceased muses over yet another biography about his life, written by "I forget the man's name - something like Holmes or Ackroyd")! The last part of this book contains in play-form, an account of the trial for the book The Whispering Gallery, a book which mixed fiction with fact show more published anonymously between the wars, causing disputes and damaging reputations. show less