Augustus John (159 page)
Authors: Michael Holroyd
This is Michael Holroyd’s essential biography of George Bernard Shaw for the general reader, with its pace and verve, its comedy, drama and politics, it shows a provocative and paradoxical figure sympathetically and movingly portrayed.
Bernard Shaw
is available
here
.
When Michael Holroyd’s life of Strachey first appeared in the late 1960s, it was hailed as a landmark in contemporary biography. Drawing on new material, published and unpublished, Holroyd completely revised and rewrote his masterwork in 1995 to tell the full story of this complex man and his world as it could not be told while many of Strachey’s friends and lovers were still alive.
At the heart of the story is the poignant liaison between Strachey and the painter Dora Carrington. A panorama of the social, literary, political and sexual life of a generation,
Lytton Strachey
reverberates in the mind like a great novel.
Lytton Strachey
is available
here
.
This 1997 revised and updated biography of the celebrated artist, using the mass of new material which has come to light since Holroyd’s two-volume first edition in the mid 1970s, reveals the complete story of John and his circle, from one of our great biographers.
John studied at the Slade with his sister Gwen before both of them went to Paris. He lived and worked at feverish speed and his drawings were astonishing for their fluid lyrical line, their vigour and spontaneity. His life became a complex tale of two cities, London and Paris, of two wives and many families. ‘The age of Augustus John was dawning,’ Virginia Woolf wrote of the year 1908, which saw many portraits of writers and artists and small glowing oil panels of figures in a landscape. His most striking work was done in the years before the First World War and when he died in 1961 his death was treated as a landmark signalling the end of a distant era.
Augustus John
is available
here
.
Michael Holroyd – the most famous biographer in Britain – turns his attention upon himself and his own family in
Basil Street Blues
(the title comes from the Basil Street Hotel where the author was conceived in the 1930s.) Born into a family rich in eccentricity, Holroyd was largely brought up by his grandparents in Maidenhead because his exotic Swedish mother and reserved English father couldn’t stand living together. (His grandparents’ marriage provided no better model – his grandfather having had a four-year affair with a woman he met at a bus stop before coming back to his grandmother). Towards the end of Holroyd’s parents’ lives he persuaded them to write their own stories and using the results, plus his own memories and researches he has written this moving and self-revealing book.
Basil Street Blues
is available
here
.
‘This is a book about surprises – at any rate, it has surprised me.’ In 1999, Michael Holroyd published
Basil Street Blues
, in which one of our finest biographers turned his attentions to something more personal – his own family. But rather than the story being over, in fact it was just beginning. For as the letters from readers started to arrive, the author discovered an extraordinary narrative that his own memoir had only touched upon.
Mosaic
, then, is Michael Holroyd’s piecing together of these remarkable stories: some of which are pleasant surprises, other more startling. There is the death of the fearsome headmaster at his school, who was murdered by one of the boys after he left: the discovery that his Swedish grandmother was the mistress of the French anarchist writer Jacques Prevert; and a letter from Margaret Forster about the beauty of his mother, that leads to his remarkable account of a decade-long affair. A love story, a detective story, a book of secrets, Mosaic is both a beautifully written journey into a forest of family trees, and a fascinating insight into the workings of genealogy.
Mosaic
is available
here
.
A Book of Secrets
is a masterfully atmospheric treasure-trove of hidden lives, uncelebrated achievements and family mysteries. Acclaimed biographer Michael Holroyd peers into dusty corners to bring a company of unknown women into the light; Alice Keppel was the mistress of both the second Lord Grimthorpe and the Prince of Wales; Eve Fairfax was Lord Grimthorpe’s abandoned fiancée and sometime muse of Auguste Rodin; and the novelist Violet Trefusis was the lover of Vita Sackville-West. Taking the reader on a journey of discovery from Ravello to Paris, from Kirkstall Grange in Yorkshire to Vita Sackville-West’s home at Knole,
A Book of Secrets
lucidly gives voice to fragile human connections.
A Book of Secrets
is available
here
.
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The story starts here.
Augustus John: A Biography
by Michael Holroyd was originally published in two volumes,
Volume 1: The Years of Innocence
and
Volume 2: The Years of Experience
, by William Heinemann Ltd in 1974 and 1975. The two volumes were published together as one volume in the USA by Holt, Rinehart & Winston Inc. in 1975 as
Augustus John: A Biography
. A revised one-volume edition was published in paperback by Penguin Books Ltd in 1976
This present edition combines the contents of all previous editions, revised, rearranged and cut, and with substantial new material added by the author
This edition first published in the Great Britain in 1997 by Chatto & Windus
This eBook edition first published in the Great Britain in 2015 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Michael Holroyd, 1974, 1975, 1976
This edition copyright © Michael Holroyd, 1996
The moral right of Michael Holroyd to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (E) 9781784971397
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