Michael Holroyd is celebrated as one of the foremost biographers of our age. His massive and bestselling accounts of the lives of Lytton Strachey, Augustus John and Bernard Shaw have been acclaimed around the world as the definitive versions for decades to come. Now he has taken time out to examine his own life, which he does with modesty, penetration and a good deal of anecdote and humour. The result is a delightful portrait of himself, his family and the years he grew up in. He was conceived in Basil Street Hotel, Knightsbridge, to a Swedish mother by an Anglo-Irish father. He went to Eton but not to university, though he has since been awarded no less than five honorary degrees. Holroyd has a talent for bringing minor characters vividly to life in the most extraordinary deadpan asides. For instance, his grandfather, whose favourite author was "an American homosexual nutritionist called Gayelord Hauser who, at an advanced age and on a diet of cider vinegar and black molasses, hazelnuts and soy bean oil, was said to have enjoyed an affair with Greta Garbo." It is a tremendous shame that neither author nor publisher thought it necessary to add an index. But that aside, this is an entertaining volume of memoirs. --Christopher Hart