RESULTS

Biographer Michael Holroyd turns his attention upon himself and his own family in "Basil Street Blues" (the title comes from the Basil Street Hotel where the author was conceived in the 1930s). Born into a family rich in eccentricity, Holroyd was largely brought up by his grandparents in Maidenhead because his exotic Swedish mother and reserved English father couldn't stand living together. His grandparents' marriage provided no better model - his grandfather having had a four-year affair with a woman he met at a bus stop before coming back to his grandmother. Towards the end of Holroyd's parents' lives he persuaded them to write their own stories and using the results, plus his own memories and research has produced Basil Street Blues.

Ellen Terry was a natural actress who filled the theatre with a magical radiance. The Times called her the 'uncrowned queen of England' but behind her public success lay a darker story. The child-bride of G. F. Watts, she eloped with a friend of Oscar Wilde at 21 and gave birth to two illegitimate children. But her greatest partnership was on-stage, with legendary actor-manager and tragedian Henry Irving. At the Lyceum Theatre in London, the two of them created a grand Cathedral of the Arts. Their intimately-involved lives exceeded in plot the Shakespearean dramas they performed on stage - and indeed were curiously affected by them. They also influenced the life and work of their remarkable children, Ellen's children in particular. Edy Craig, who founded a feminist theatre group, The Pioneer Players, established a lesbian community whose complex love-affairs make those of the Bloomsbury Group appear quite conventional. Her brother, Edward Gordon Craig, the revolutionary stage designer who collaborated with Stanislavski on a spectacular production of Hamlet in Moscow, is revealed by this book to be the forgotten man of modernism.