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Lytton Strachey

The New Biography

By Michael Holroyd (Author)

Paperback published by W. W. Norton & Company (W. W. Norton & Company)

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About This Book
"It is impossible to suppose that this ‘Life' will ever be superseded .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
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"It is impossible to suppose that this ‘Life' will ever be superseded .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
Product Details
Paperback (600 pages)
Published: December 17, 2005
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Imprint: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393327199
Other books byMichael Holroyd
(13)
  • On Wheels

    On Wheels
    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.
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    Bernard Shaw

    Bernard Shaw
    The One-Volume Definitive Edition
    In a single-volume format, Michael Holroyd's masterpiece of a biography offers new verve and pace; Shaw's world is more dramatically revealed as Holroyd counterpoints the private and public Shaw with inimitable insight and scholarship.
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    Mosaic: A Family Memoir Revisited

    Mosaic: A Family Memoir Revisited
    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.
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    A Strange Eventful History

    A Strange Eventful History
    The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry...
    In A Strange Eventful History, one of our greatest living biographers turns his attention to a gruop of history's most influential performers, a remarkable dynasty that presided over the golden age of theater. Ellen Terry was ther era's most powerful actress.  George Bernard Shaw was so besotted that he wrote her letters almost daily, but could not bear to meet her, lest the spell she cast from the stage be broken.  Henry Irving was a merchant's clerk who by force of will and wit became one of the greatest actor-managers in the history of the theater.  Together, Irving and Terry presided over a powerhouse of the arts in London's Lyceum Theatre and revived English theater as a popular art form. Exactingly researched and bursting with charismatic life, this epic story follows Terry and Irving and their brilliant but volatile children--among them Terry's son, Edward Gordon Craig, the revolutionary theatrical designer.  A Strange Eventful History is more than an account of the great classical age of London theater; it is a potrait of nineteenth-century society on the precipice of great change.
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  • February 06, 1995
    via Publishers Weekly

    Holroyd's big, gossipy life of English historian Lytton Strachey (1880-1932), first published in 1968 and now in a revised, expanded edition, offers a vibrant, intimate portrait of the Bloomsbury circle, their love affairs, jealousies and creative ferment. In Eminent Victorians (1918), Strachey stripped away the pious camouflage of Victorian society, targeting hypocrisy, imperialism, militarism and religion. Holroyd, biographer of G.B. Shaw, credits Strachey with revolutionizing historical biography by emphasizing character and hidden sexuality and subverting traditional forms through caricature and psychological innuendo. Drawing on thousands of letters by Strachey and his Bloomsbury coterie, Holroyd unearths details of Strachey's adolescent self-loathing and sexual guilt; his proposing marriage to Virginia Woolf in an effort to renounce his homosexuality; his pacifism during WWI; and his relationship with his adoring live-in companion, painter Dora Carrington, who tolerated his gay affairs. This panoramic account of Strachey's trajectory from hypersensitive, shy Cambridge undergraduate to social and literary lion is peopled with the likes of D.H. Lawrence, Rupert Brooke, John Maynard Keynes, T.S. Eliot, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Augustus John and Bertrand Russell. Photos. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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    Holroyd's big, gossipy life of English historian Lytton Strachey (1880-1932), first published in 1968 and now in a revised, expanded edition, offers a vibrant, intimate portrait of the Bloomsbury circle, their love affairs, jealousies and creative ferment. In Eminent Victorians (1918), Strachey stripped away the pious camouflage of Victorian society, targeting hypocrisy, imperialism, militarism and religion. Holroyd, biographer of G.B. Shaw, credits Strachey with revolutionizing historical biography by emphasizing character and hidden sexuality and subverting traditional forms through caricature and psychological innuendo. Drawing on thousands of letters by Strachey and his Bloomsbury coterie, Holroyd unearths details of Strachey's adolescent self-loathing and sexual guilt; his proposing marriage to Virginia Woolf in an effort to renounce his homosexuality; his pacifism during WWI; and his relationship with his adoring live-in companion, painter Dora Carrington, who tolerated his gay affairs. This panoramic account of Strachey's trajectory from hypersensitive, shy Cambridge undergraduate to social and literary lion is peopled with the likes of D.H. Lawrence, Rupert Brooke, John Maynard Keynes, T.S. Eliot, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Augustus John and Bertrand Russell. Photos. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved


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