From The Times
August 15, 2008
Interview with Michael Holroyd
Britain's top biographer disusses his new book A Strange Eventful History, about Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and the Victorian theatre world, with Jane Wheatley

THERE IS A RUG - a large kilim possibly - in the upstairs drawing room of Michael Holroyd's London house; it is the blue of summer sky in a hot country, with a border of deep, dark red and I am struck by its loveliness. “It's a wishing carpet,” he says, “Go ahead, make a wish.” He steps back, leaving me in sole possession of its magic, so I close my eyes obediently and utter a silent petition.

“Well done,” he says, folding his long frame into an armchair, dressed like a schoolboy in dark grey trousers and a navy V-neck jumper. I don't ask him what he has wished for in the past - these things are private - or if his wishes were granted, but I'd guess they were. Because here he is on the cusp of 73, alive and apparently well, after an arduous skirmish with bowel cancer involving chemotherapy, radiotherapy and four bouts of surgery - the most recent of which saved his life.

The remorseless round of hospital visits punctuated work on his new book, a whopping 600 pages, seven years in the making: “It was a way of escaping illness, having something else to think about,” he says. A Strange and Eventful History started out with modest ambitions as a biography of Ellen Terry, the actress and Shakespearean heroine, as much a queen of hearts for her adoring Victorian public as Diana, Princess of Wales, would be a century later. But equally admired, though not so well loved, was Henry Irving, her leading man and impresario of the Lyceum Theatre: “Henry elbowed his way into the book,” Holroyd says. “Then their two families were all clamouring to be let in too.”

Read the full piece from The Times online.