Michael Holroyd

Sidney and Beatrice

Michael Holroyd, 25 October 1979

‘I can’t help it being “Beauty and the Beast,” ’ wrote Sidney Webb to Beatrice Potter shortly before their marriage in 1892, ‘ – if only it is not a case of Titania and Bottom!’ The courtship of this super-extraordinary pair – ‘two active self-centred people, excessively devoted to the public cause,’ as H.G. Wells characterised them in The New Machiavelli – was the oddest romance in the Fabian calendar and a triumph for Sidney’s policy of gradualism.

Bogey’s Clean Sweep

Michael Holroyd, 22 May 1980

On 7 August 1922, in a letter for her husband John Middleton Murry to be opened after her death, katherine Mansfield wrote:

Letter

Gerhardie

2 April 1981

SIR: Frank Kermode (LRB, 2 April) recommends ‘everyone interested in good novels’ to read William Gerhardie, but calls for an even stronger base than Futility and God’s Fifth Column on which to rebuild Gerhardie’s reputation. He will be pleased to hear that Penguin plan to publish the first paperback edition of Of Mortal Love later this year. As for the matter of misprints, another effort to...

Fabian Figaro

Michael Holroyd, 3 December 1981

Second-hand book dealers will tell you that of all Bernard Shaw’s out-of-print works, the volumes of music criticism have been in most constant demand. It is therefore excellent news (except perhaps to secondhand book dealers) that the Bodley Head has now issued, in the same chunky format as the Collected Plays, these three volumes containing all Shaw’s writings on music.

Inexhaustible Engines

Michael Holroyd, 1 March 1984

What is a bibliography? For Bernard Shaw it was a directory whose natural subscribers were to be found among librarians, biographers, critics and occasionally the authors themselves. He regarded its aim as the production of opus lists that would be useful to specialists. Such an attitude, his own bibliographer informs us, was appallingly inadequate, revealing ‘a man who had no understanding or respect for the responsibilities of scholarship’. To Dan Laurence, bibliography is something other. Where Shaw had observed only a harmless drudge, Mr Laurence sees ‘an exacting science’, a work that may be ‘treated artfully’, and the culmination (like an elevation to the peerage) of a lifetime’s achievement.

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One’s Self-Washed Drawers: Ida John

Rosemary Hill, 29 June 2017

She might have been happy enough had not her ‘beautiful warm face’ caught the eye of Augustus John. Then she knew what it was to have a grand passion and to be on the horns of a dilemma.

Exit Humbug: Theatrical Families

David Edgar, 1 January 2009

Ellen Terry was the youngest daughter of two touring players, and began her own stage career at the age of six. Ten years later, she married a painter three times her age; they separated within...

Charging Downhill: Michael Holroyd

Frank Kermode, 28 October 1999

When he came to write his autobiography, the biographer Michael Holroyd decided to restrict himself to what he calls ‘a good walk-on part’, assigning the leading roles to his family....

After-Lives

John Sutherland, 5 November 1992

A man of many literary parts, Ian Hamilton came to biography late and triumphantly with his life of the dead but still warm Robert Lowell. Riding high, he went on to attempt an unauthorised life...

Molly’s Methuselah

Frank Kermode, 26 September 1991

At the beginning of Mr Holroyd’s third volume Shaw, now 62, is expressing strong views, sensible but not attended to, on the conduct of the nation’s affairs in a difficult postwar...

Baby Face

John Bayley, 24 May 1990

Who said of whom: ‘I have talent but he has genius’? Evelyn Waugh had been reading Futility, which first came out in 1922, but his favourite Gerhardie novel was to be Jazz and Jasper....

Power-Seeker

Frank Kermode, 12 October 1989

Having followed Shaw on a largely unsuccessful pursuit of love in Volume I, Mr Holroyd in his second instalment sets him off on what turns out to be an equally frustrated pursuit of power. It may...

Georgian eyes are smiling

Frank Kermode, 15 September 1988

There were already good biographies of Shaw, notably those of Frank Harris and Hesketh Pearson, both of whom knew Shaw and had the benefit of his energetic interventions. Pearson in particular...

Is it a crime?

P.N. Furbank, 6 June 1985

As is well known, there is a curious association between bibliography and crime. It has something to do with a relationship to books as physical objects, and something to do with the fact that...

Posterity

Frank Kermode, 2 April 1981

Gerhardie is one of those writers who are periodically rescued from near-oblivion. In 1947, a temporary revival of interest was brought about by the publication of a ‘Uniform Edition’...

Strachey, Prospero, and The Seventh Heaven

Peter Clarke, 22 May 1980

It is odd that Lytton Strachey did not manage to strike up much fellow-feeling for Prospero. In an essay of 1904 on Shakespeare’s final period we find the puncturing remark...

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