Michael Holroyd

Holroyd's two-volume Lytton Strachey of 1967 and 1968 was the first biography to write openly about its subject's homosexuality and the tangled loves of the Bloomsbury group, using letters the family made available, and it changed how British biography treated private life. His later life of Augustus John and his four-volume Bernard Shaw followed with the same readable thoroughness, and his memoirs, such as Basil Street Blues, show how family secrets shape any life. Begin with the revised single-volume Lytton Strachey: The New Biography.