Early life and education
Holroyd was born in London, the son of Basil de Courcy Fraser Holroyd (a descendant of Sir George Sowley Holroyd, Justice of the King's Bench, whose ancestor was Isaac Holroyd, younger brother of George, the great-great-grandfather of John Baker Holroyd, 1st Earl of Sheffield), [1] and his wife, Ulla (known as "Sue"), daughter of Karl Knutsson-Hall, a Swedish army officer. His parents having separated- their son "left to grow up in a bewilderingly extended family, shunted back and forth among parents and stepparents and grandparents and uncles and aunts"- Holroyd was raised at his father's family home, Norhurst, at Maidenhead, Berkshire. The Holroyds "for a time enjoyed a small fortune", provided by, amongst other things, an Indian tea plantation; this fortune was eventually "done in by mismanagement of resources and foolish investments" including investment in Lalique glassware, his grandfather having been its sole London agent in the 1920s. [2] [3] [4] The Holroyd family had been "for several centuries" Yorkshire "butchers, clergymen, clothiers, farmers, landowners, soldiers, yeoman (sic) of all kinds". [5]
He was educated at Eton College, though he has often claimed Maidenhead Public Library as his alma mater.
Career
In 1964, Holroyd published his first book, a biography of the writer Hugh Kingsmill; his reputation was consolidated in 1967–68 with the publication of his two-volume life of Lytton Strachey (which the playwright Christopher Hampton later used extensively when writing the screenplay for the 1995 film Carrington ). Holroyd has also written biographies of Augustus John and, in four volumes, of Bernard Shaw. His book A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers (2010) concerns the Villa Cimbrone on the Gulf of Salerno and the Edwardian literary and society figures who lived there, such as Ernest Beckett, 2nd Baron Grimthorpe.
Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography (1967, 1968) became Holroyd's definitive work. He published a revised version in 1994 under the revised subtitle The New Biography. [6]
Holroyd was chairman of the Society of Authors, 1973–83, and from 1985 to 1988 was president of the English branch of PEN. He is also President of the Shaw Society. [7] His awards include the 2001 Heywood Hill Literary Prize and the 2005 David Cohen Prize for literature. In 2006, he was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN for "a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature". [8] He was president of the Royal Society of Literature from 2003 to 2008, and was knighted in the 2007 New Year Honours List. Holroyd is a patron of Dignity in Dying. [9]
Augustus Edwin John was a Welsh painter, draughtsman, and etcher. For a time he was considered the most important artist at work in Britain: Virginia Woolf remarked that by 1908 the era of John Singer Sargent and Charles Wellington Furse "was over. The age of Augustus John was dawning." He was the younger brother of the painter Gwen John.
Giles Lytton Strachey was an English writer and critic. A founding member of the Bloomsbury Group and author of Eminent Victorians, he established a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit. His biography Queen Victoria (1921) was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Eminent Victorians is a book by Lytton Strachey, first published in 1918, and consisting of biographies of four leading figures from the Victorian era. Its fame rests on the irreverence and wit Strachey brought to bear on three men and a woman who had, until then, been regarded as heroes: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Charles Gordon. While Nightingale is actually praised and her reputation enhanced, the book shows its other subjects in a less-than-flattering light, for instance, the intrigues of Cardinal Manning against Cardinal Newman.
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, known professionally by her former married name, A. S. Byatt, was an English critic, novelist, poet and short story writer. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages.
Dora de Houghton Carrington, known generally as Carrington, was an English painter and decorative artist, remembered in part for her association with members of the Bloomsbury Group, especially the writer Lytton Strachey. From her time as an art student, she was known simply by her surname as she considered Dora to be "vulgar and sentimental". She was not well known as a painter during her lifetime, as she rarely exhibited and did not sign her work. She worked for a while at the Omega Workshops, and for the Hogarth Press, designing woodcuts.
Hugh Kingsmill Lunn, who dropped his surname for professional purposes, was a versatile British writer and journalist. The writers Arnold Lunn and Brian Lunn were his brothers.
Philip Blake Morrison FRSL is an English poet and author who has published in a wide range of fiction and non-fiction genres. His greatest success came with the publication of his memoirs And When Did You Last See Your Father? (1993), which won the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography. He has also written a study of the murder of James Bulger, As If. Since 2003, Morrison has been Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Paul Levy is a US/British author and journalist. He lives with his wife, art historian, Penelope Marcus, in Oxfordshire UK.
Dr Ruth Scurr FRSL, aka Lady Stothard, is a British writer, historian and literary critic. She is a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
James Beaumont Strachey was a British psychoanalyst, and, with his wife Alix, a translator of Sigmund Freud into English. He is perhaps best known as the general editor of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, "the international authority".
Frances Catherine Partridge CBE was an English writer. Closely connected to the Bloomsbury Group, she is probably best known for the publication of her diaries. She married Ralph Partridge in 1933. The couple had one son, (Lytton) Burgo Partridge (1935–1963).
Ella Hepworth Dixon was an English author and editor. Her best-known work is the New Woman novel The Story of a Modern Woman, which has been reprinted in the 21st century.
In Good King Charles's Golden Days is a play by George Bernard Shaw, subtitled A True History that Never Happened.
John Stewart Collis was an Irish biographer, rural author, and pioneer of the ecology movement. He is known for his book The Worm Forgives the Plough based on his wartime experience working in the Land Army in the Second World War.
The biographer, cultural historian and critic Jeremy Treglown is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Warwick. He was editor of The Times Literary Supplement through the 1980s and chair of the Arvon Foundation, 2017–22.
Saxon Arnoll Sydney-Turner was a member of the Bloomsbury Group who worked as a British civil servant throughout his life.
Reginald Sherring Partridge,, generally known as Ralph Partridge, was a member of the Bloomsbury Group. He worked for Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf, married Dora Carrington and then Frances Marshall, and was the unrequited love of Lytton Strachey.
Hilary Harold Rubinstein was a British publisher and literary agent. He was described by Ion Trewin in an obituary published in The Guardian as "one of Britain's premier literary agents".
Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography is a 1967–68 two-volume biography of Lytton Strachey by Michael Holroyd, often seen as the author's magnum opus. He published a revised version in 1994 with a revised subtitle, The New Biography.
The World was a British weekly paper, published in London from 1874 to 1920. It was founded by Edmund Hodgson Yates (1831–1894) and E. C. Grenville Murray (1824–1881) and became one of the leading society papers with investigative reports, gossip and an intimate style of journalism. Among its staff and contributors were William Archer, Wilkie Collins and Bernard Shaw.
