Within two slender and discrete volumes, distinguished biographer Michael Holroyd recounts the story of his isolated family. Offered almost as religious texts, one is a beautifully pressed collection of ferns made by his great-grandmother in India in the mid-19th century; the second is a series of photographs of silent-movie stars gathered by his aunt Yolande in the 1920s. Through these images Holroyd unravels the lives, tragic and comic, behind these strangely magical and peculiar assemblies, as his family drifts between India and England, cut off from the outside world. “Ours was a sombre house,” he says, “and the joylessness was deepened by the grim eccentricities of the family, to which I made my contribution.” Exquisitely tuned to those eccentricities, Holroyd’s sharp tap sets the ears ringing. “We were like astronomers,” he says, “unable to see light and measure time before the Big Bang.”
• Ancestors in the Attic by Michael Holroyd is published by Pimpernel Press (£35). To order a copy for £29.75 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
