Synopses & Reviews
Works on Paper is a selection by one of today's leading biographers from his lectures, essays, and reviews written over the last quarter of a century mainly on the craft of biography and autobiography, but also covering what Michael Holroyd describes as his "enthusiasms and alibis".
Opening with a startling attack on biography, which is answered by two essays on the ethics and values of nonfiction writing, the book goes on to examine the work of several contemporary biographers, the place of biography in fiction and of fiction in biography, and the revelations of some extravagant autobiographers, from Osbert Sitwell to Quentin Crisp to which he adds some adventures of his own, in particular an important and unpublished piece "The Making of GBS," a riveting story of internecine literary warfare.
The book ends with a series of satires, celebrations, apologias and polemics which throw light not only on Michael Holroyd's progress as a biographer, but also his record as an embattled campaigner in the field of present-day literary politics.
Review
"Here then, is a thought-provoking, entertaining and wonderfully exhilarating collection form the hand (though should I say from the quill?) of the master....Michael Holroyd has presided with a genial and generous wand over what he calls a golden age of biography." The Saturday Telegraph
Review
"Three decades on, Holroyd is the grand old man of English biography and, in this elegant collection of essays, champion of the genre's freedom and truthfulness....The themes of his life's work, its broad historical significance are wonderfully distilled here." Financial Times
Review
"Holroyd writes with such elegance and adroit humour....This book is also full of bon mots about biography, amusing anecdotes...and plenty of good jokes." The Evening Standard
Review
"He is peerless in his powers of psychological penetration, graced with an easy, lucid and buoyant style (I have never caught him involved in a dull or prolix sentence) and exceptionally rich in the two greatest of all biographer's virtues the knack of telling a human story, and an inexhaustible curiosity about people and the existential gap between what they do and who they are." The Spectator
About the Author
Michael Holroyd was born in 1935 and educated at Eton College. His lives of Hugh Kingsmill, Lytton Strachey, Augustus John and George Bernard Shaw have established him as one of the most influential biographers of modern times. His family autobiography, Basil Street Blues (1999) garnered the greatest number of nonfiction end-of-year critics' choices that year. A past chairman of the Society of Authors, the Royal Society of Literature and Book Trust, past president of English PEN and a former member of the Arts Council, Michael Holroyd has lectured around the world for the British Council and at literary festivals. He is married to the novelist Margaret Drabble and lives in London and Somerset.