Writing Life Bundle

Writing Life

Michael Holroyd, Basil Street Blues

Well-known for his frank biographies of such controversial figures as Augustus John and Lytton Strachey, Holroyd teases out the story of his own distinctly problematic family in this delightful and original book. His volatile father, always busy with his own enterprises, and his glamorous Swedish mother with her succession of exotic husbands, had only walk-on parts in his life. It was only after both parents died that he was overcome by a desire to find the ‘connecting story’ which his fragmented childhood had so lacked. The result is a very personal detective story, subtle, funny and poignant.

Jennie Erdal, Ghosting

‘A large sapphire on the lapel of a bold striped suit, a vivid silk tie so bright that it dazzles . . . on his fingers a collection of jewels . . .’ – this is the man Jennie Erdal calls ‘Tiger’, the flamboyant figure at the centre of Ghosting, the strange and gripping story of the 20 years in which she became his ghost writer. Erdal created a whole literary oeuvre in his name, and even turned his ludicrous plot ideas and sexual fantasies into novels that were seriously and admiringly reviewed. Ghosting is a wickedly funny book, but it is also a thoughtful look at deception and self-deception, and the masks that most of us wear.

Roald Dahl, Boy

It’s easy to see from this childhood memoir where the ogres who people Dahl’s fiction come from: the vengeful and filthy-fingernailed sweetshop owner Mrs Pratchett, the school doctor who lances little Ellis’s boil in such a heartless manner, the creepy headmaster of Repton who wields the cane with unacceptable relish. But there’s another, far more cheerful side to the story in the person of Dahl’s adored mother Sofie who, widowed at 35 with six children to care for, nevertheless managed to leave them with idyllic childhood memories. Like many individualists, Dahl never fitted in at school and was ecstatic when he finally escaped to work for Shell, setting off for East Africa with the same infectious bounce and enthusiasm that permeate this irresistible little book.

Jessica Mitford, Hons and Rebels

In this funny and perceptive memoir Jessica Mitford describes growing up as the fifth of the notoriously headstrong Mitford sisters. An isolated childhood in the hideous Cotswold house built by their father Lord Redesdale (‘Farve’), where life centred round the church and the Conservative party, turned ‘Decca’ as she was known into a lifelong socialist. At 18 she made her escape, eloping spectacularly with her charismatic left-wing cousin Esmond Romilly, moving to the East End of London and then running a bar in Miami. It’s a story of sheer bravado brilliantly told by one of the most eccentric members of an eccentric family.

Richard Cobb, Still Life

The historian Richard Cobb, famous for his brilliant books on France and the French Revolution, his inspirational teaching and his unconventional behaviour, grew up in the 1920s and ’30s in the quiet and deeply conventional town of Tunbridge Wells. Yet Cobb loved that small world with its middle-class confidence and soothing predictability – it was, he writes, ‘a society in which a rather frightened child could feel secure’. In this unusual memoir he recreates it in entrancing detail as he experienced it between the ages of 4 and 13. Arriving at the Central Station, with its wooden staircase advertising ‘Carter’s Little Liver Pills’, he leads us through the town and into the lives of the characters among whom he grew up, each minutely observed and remembered, from the mysterious Black Widow, seen always in deep yet unexplained mourning, to Baroness Olga, the town’s only victim of the Russian Revolution, with her tight-fitting cloche hat and jade earrings. At home his mother entertains her tweed-and-Jaeger-clad Bridge-playing friends while down the road in their large, dank Victorian mansion his extraordinary cousins the Limbury-Buses live their lives according to an unchanging regime of walks, rests and meals which are timed to the minute. ‘Strange and wonderful,’ wrote Hilary Spurling in the Observer when the book was first published. And indeed it is.