Basil Street Blues

"This was interesting to me because it gave me glimpses into a certain kind of Englishness. It is a family memoir by Michael Holroyd, one of the great English biographers . His family – his father’s family at least – is quite a privileged English family which has gone into decline. The memoir gave me a sense of the vicissitudes and non-belonging that one can feel within what appears to be a stable family and social background. Holroyd went to Eton, and as he grows up there are elements of glamour and identification with this background, but at the same time an ordinary human suffering which is quite strong. He wishes to disappear, as he repeatedly tells us in the memoir, because there is so much in his family life and upbringing that he cannot bear. He does a lot of close detective research on his own family history , through archives, letters, interviews and so on. He excavates the history in the same way that he would in a biography. He writes biographical portraits of his relatives. And he gives an insight into his impulse to write biography – which is the impulse to make himself invisible, the observer. He tries to overcome that in this memoir, where he must insert himself. But one can sense his impulse to disappear in his writing, and how much he is interested in other lives."