Word: holroyds
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...Gladstone and Edward VII, and Robert Blake on Benjamin Disraeli. In literature there are treasures from both sides of the Atlantic. Richard Ellmann's Joyce, George Painter's Proust and Leon Edel's James are the chief prizes, but there are many other jewels, including Michael Holroyd on Lytton Strachey, Francis Steegmuller on Cocteau and Quentin Bell on Virginia Woolf. Moreover, the past year has brought a host of distinguished and bestselling additions to the collection: William Manchester island-hopping with Douglas MacArthur, Edmund Morris galloping up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt and Barbara Tuchman wading...
...MICHAEL HOLROYD...
...every level of English society. He was a licensed vertical invader, conspicuous even in the notable roster of Edwardian eccentrics that stretched from the Cafe Royal to Bloomsbury. There had of course been English bohemians before, but none had seemed so obstreperously life-enhancing as Augustus John. As Michael Holroyd observes in this superb biography, "In the public imagination he was to represent the Great Artist, the Great Lover, the Great Bohemian Enjoyer of Life. It was a cruelly ironic comment on his actual career, one which he did not accept himself but never effectively contradicted...
Sense of Balance. Eight years ago, with an imposing biography of Lytton Strachey, Holroyd (now 41) became one of our best guides to the cultural life of England in the early 20th century. No one of his generation has done more to clarify the achievements and emotional imbrications of the Bloomsbury group, or to deflate its more self-enchanted pieties. A great deal of the truth about a society lies in the lives of its minor artists. To write about them without falling into postures of condescension, gossip or overpraise is one of the toughest of all biographical feats...
...down the faces of his friends-poets from Yeats to Dylan Thomas, writers like Shaw, collectors like the flustered and bigoted American John Quinn-with a picaresque dash which, in the celebrity portraiture of his later years, turned into a routine of dispiriting feebleness. Like John at his zenith, Holroyd creates a suite of sardonic and sympathetic verbal portraits. Between the figures flow the ingredients of that most difficult of works-the biography of a grandiose failure...