Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers by Michael Holroyd

by
June 2011, no. 332

A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers by Michael Holroyd

Chatto & Windus, $46.95 hb, 270 pp

A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers by Michael Holroyd

by
June 2011, no. 332

In a review on quite another subject for ABR’s recent summer issue (‘Barry by Edna’, December 2010–January 2011), I had occasion to invoke the career of Michael Holroyd, ‘reigning, if ailing, king of English biographers’, as I dubbed him. On the basis of his well-publicised illness, I sadly but confidently declared that Holroyd’s joint biographical study of the Irving and Terry theatrical dynasties, A Strange Eventful History (2008), was ‘likely to be his last’. How delightful now to be proved wrong with the appearance of A Book of Secrets.

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.