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.
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