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“... two, he is being consciously naive. He knows perfectly well he will be judged principally against Michael Holroyd, whose multi-volume Shaw is one of the longest, most detailed, comprehensive and highly praised biographies of the 20th century. Gibbs’s major charge against Holroyd is that he allowed himself to be taken ...”

“... to keep a tight rein on her three daughters. Adaline’s moral code was worked out in what Michael Holroyd in his introduction memorably terms the ‘moral gymnasium’ of the last Victorian decades. He characterises it, too harshly, as a culture of ‘conceit and condemnation … complacency and fear of change’, but it was a period when ...”

“... the chance to see and hear David Starkey cheek by jowl with Zadie Smith, Roy Strong, Terry Jones, Michael Holroyd and all the other writers showcasing their various talents this year. Such events certainly seem to be increasing rapidly in number and variety. Cheltenham and Hay-on-Wye (Tony Benn: ‘In my mind, it has replaced Christmas’) are well ...”

“... Having followed Shaw on a largely unsuccessful pursuit of love in Volume I, Mr Holroyd in his second instalment sets him off on what turns out to be an equally frustrated pursuit of power. It may seem curious that we are being asked to regard a man of such dazzling achievement as repeatedly failing in his aims, and at this stage we can only speculate about what he will be pursuing and not catching up with in Volume III ...”

“... At the beginning of Mr Holroyd’s third volume Shaw, now 62, is expressing strong views, sensible but not attended to, on the conduct of the nation’s affairs in a difficult postwar period. He began this long last lap of life by campaigning for Ramsay MacDonald, and the other anti-Coalition candidates, in Lloyd George’s opportunistic general election of December 1918 ...”

“... here nor there. For the last couple of years the Royal Society of Literature under its chairman Michael Holroyd has been lobbying the Heritage Lottery Fund to release money for the acquisition of the papers of living British authors. On 9 April, Ferdinand Mount used his pulpit in the TLS to add reasoned support for a long-term policy of preserving the ...”

“... no separatist, however, and acknowledged how much she owed to the men who helped her: Paul Hamlyn, Michael Holroyd, Sonny Mehta, Christopher MacLehose, Bob Gavron. 1980s-90s. When Carmen moved to Chatto as their managing director in 1982 she lavished care on her authors: Iris Murdoch, Hilary Mantel, Hermione Lee and other Bloomsbury biographers and ...”

“... the Shaw Estate sensibly decided that the time had come for a new biography, and invited Mr Holroyd to write it. It is not surprising that the work has preoccupied him for a great many years, nor that it will consist of three large volumes. This one takes Shaw from his birth in 1856 to his marriage in 1898, by which time he was already celebrated or ...”

“... visitors that poor Henry has a chill, when he’s insensible, or even, sometimes, in hospital. Michael Holroyd, working on his book on Lytton Strachey, went to interview Green about Ottoline Morrell, whom he’d known well, of course, like most of those more flamboyant contemporaries who were figuring in new Lives: ‘Dig received him ...”

“... often with non-publishing or foreign management at the highest level. Penguin, Hamish Hamilton, Michael Joseph, Frederick Warne and Longman – all once imprints with independent identities – now congregate within the Pearson group (best known for its ownership of the Financial Times). Random House UK (whose American parent was long since swallowed up by ...”

“... Who said of whom: ‘I have talent but he has genius’? Evelyn Waugh had been reading Futility, which first came out in 1922, but his favourite Gerhardie novel was to be Jazz and Jasper. This almost forgotten work appeared in 1927, two years earlier than Vile Bodies. Its author wanted to call it Doom, a title not adopted until the 1974 edition. In 1947 it made a brief appearance as My Sinful Earth, and the 1928 American edition was called Eve’s Apples, the American publisher having decided, no doubt wisely, that the word ‘jazz’ had been ‘worn threadbare’ in crossing the Atlantic ...”

“... its humour less absorbing than before. Even that blend of the banal and the appalling, to which Michael Holroyd rightly drew attention, was not as compulsive as it had been. The past was claiming its own. Disillusion is in a sense completed by this biography: not, I hasten to say, the biographer’s fault, since he has made it as readable as ...”

“... Florence Nightingale. Yet Strachey himself seems less our contemporary now than he did when Michael Holroyd’s biography appeared in the late 1960s. Greeting the publication of G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica in 1903, the young Strachey imagined that ‘the truth’ was ‘really now upon the march’ and that ‘the Age of Reason’ had dawned at ...”

“... look, he selects areas already well investigated. If you’ve read David Newsome, Annan himself, Michael Holroyd and Hermione Lee on the Wilberforces, Leslie Stephen, Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf, you’re likely to know what’s coming before you’ve turned the page – and there’s a limit to the appeal even of Clapham psychodrama and ...”

“... 20 grand a year seems to be the favoured target. Beryl Bainbridge owns up to making £35,000 and Michael Holroyd regards £70,000 as a decent haul. Will Self can manage on anything between £40,000 and £80,000. At the bottom end of the scale there are poets who would happily settle for a regular 12 grand. Writers with film and mass-media connections ...”