Basil Street Blues A Memoir [Paperback]

Renowned biographer Michael Holroyd had always assumed that his own family was perfectly English, or at least perfectly ordinary. But an investigation into the Holroyd pastguided by old photograph albums, crumbling documents, and his parents' wildly divergent accounts of their livesgradually yields clues to a constellation of startling events and eccentric characters: a slow decline from English nobility on one side, a dramatic Scandinavian ancestry on the other. Fires, suicides, bankruptcies, divorces, unconsummated longings, and the rumor of an Indian tea fortune permeate this wry, candid memoir, part multiple biography, part autobiography, but principally an oblique investigation of the biographer's art ( A wonderful offbeat memoir.... Holroyd has written perhaps his best book yet. Ben Macintyre,