Basil Street Blues and Mosaic
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Book Description
This enchanting collection by James Tait Black Award winning biographer Michael Holroyd contains his two volumes of memoir - Basil Street Blues and Mosaic
Product Description
Michael Holroyd is one of the finest biographers of our time yet he was never interested in exploring his own family's history until the death of his parents in the 1980s. Then, faced with a sudden vacuum, he felt a desire to fill it with the stories of their lives.
Basil Street Blues, the first of his volumes of memoir, is part detective story, part family memoir and part an oblique voyage of self-discovery which is both startlingly comic and profoundly moving. In his follow-up volume, Mosaic, he delves deeper into his family history. Witty, touching and wry, Mosaic shows the strange interconnectedness of our lives, and how other people's stories, however eccentric or extreme, echo our own dreams and experiences.
These two volumes - published together for the first time here - form an extraordinary piece of writing, and an enthralling lesson in identity and perspective for both author and reader.
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8 reviews
26 of 26 people found the following review helpful
A Champagne Cocktail of a Memoir
31 Mar 2000
Format:Hardcover
Michael Holroyd's "Basil Street Blues" is a marvelously readable memoir by the biographer of Lytton Strachey and others. Holroyd's early life in England before, during and after WWII was filled with a cast of eccentrics-- one grandmother occasionally sported a monocle, the other shouted the odd word in French; his mother was compared in every way to champagne; his father was "a most unlikely old Etonian;" and the waning family fortune came several generations back from Rajmai Tea, a company whose dramatic ups and downs proved "better than a seat at the opera." Holroyd cleverly explains how this oddball cast of characters ultimately led him into the profession of writing biography. This is a wonderful story, told not without pathos and humor. One hopes for a sequel.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
A biography lovers dream
13 Oct 2000
Format:Hardcover
This is one of the most beautifully constructed books ....beginning slowly with an introduction too Holroyd's unusal ancestors .... his own shyness and youth among various estranged folks, and then building to a wonderful, generous, end.
I was quite overwhelmed as the last few chapters came round. I am highly recommending it to readers
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Reading the Lines of Basil Street Blues and Between Them
20 April 2000
Format:Hardcover
Although Michael Holroyd had a difficult life growing up among eccentrics, his beautiful prose and gentle sense of humor show that he nonetheless emerged as a remarkably insightful, down-to-earth adult. His descriptions of the people who influenced him are wonderfully observant, and kinder than most of the people probably deserved. On page 142, he notes that what he can reveal "emerges more between the lines of my writing," and he gives us ample lines to read between. I would strongly recommend Basil Street Blues to anyone interested in the art of memoir writing, as well as anyone interested in knowing more about Holroyd.
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