Published by Pimlico, part of Vintage Publishing
Format: Paperback
£20.00
Author:
Michael Holroyd
Format: Paperback
EAN: 9781845951849
£20.00
Available for dispatch within 1-2 working days
EAN: 9781845951849
Published: 15 Dec 2011
This 1997 revised and updated biography of the celebrated artist, using the mass of new material which has come to light since Holroyd's two-volume first edition in the mid 1970s, reveals the complete story of John and his circle, from one of our great biographers.
John studied at the Slade with his sister Gwen before both of them went to Paris. He lived and worked at feverish speed and his drawings were astonishing for their fluid lyrical line, their vigor and spontaneity. His life became a complex tale of two cities, London and Paris, of two wives and many families. 'The age of Augustus John was dawning,' Virginia Woolf wrote of the year 1908, which saw many portraits of writers and artists and small glowing oil panels of figures in a landscape. His most striking work was done in the years before the First World War and when he died in 1961 his death was treated as a landmark signaling the end of a distant era.
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Superb biography. . . . Holroyd has it all
- Time
Vastly informative and hugely entertaining
- Newsweek
An entertaining, essentially comic story... Holroyd tells it with great skill and elegance
- Sunday Telegraph
Here is one of the most entertaining lives ever written... Holroyd depicts his subjects with great sympathy and understanding... Very funny... thought-provoking
- Mail on Sunday
Both a celebration and a tragedy. The celebration of a man of enormous vitality, intermittent zest and remarkable magnetism, and of the most naturally gifted artist that the English-speaking world has produced in the last hundred years; and the tragedy of a man who never came to terms with himself... A wonderfully engrossing, entertaining and even moving book
- Daily Telegraph
Besides the biographies of Augustus John, Bernard Shaw and Lytton Strachey (which was filmed as Carrington), Michael Holroyd has written two volumes of memoirs, Basil Street Blues and Mosaic. He was president of the Royal Society of Literature from 2003 - 2008 and is the only non-fiction writer to have been awarded the British Literature Prize. He lives in London and Somerset with his wife, the novelist Margaret Drabble.
