Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in the year 2000, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a biographer, the son of parents who married little and often, he was

sent to school at Eton but studied literature as his who's who entry explains at Maidenhead

Public Library. His fragmented upbringing taught

himself effacement and it's through writing about others that his fame has come.

His lives of Litton Strachey, Augustus John and George Bernard Shaw are modern monuments to great achievers in our past.

And in their unashamed honesty of every aspect of their subject's lives are said to have transformed biographical writing in this country.

His latest work is his autobiography, a sign presumably that he's overcome the horror of scrutiny,

which led him to become, as he's put it, absorbed in lives quite different from my own.

He is Michael Holroyd.

Michael, your desire for invisibility was so strong for so long, it's a minor miracle you wrote this autobiography isn't it?

Well some people say it's an extended act of concealment, self-concelement and that they don't

recognize me from it and other people say it's a way of stopping anybody else writing.

Well, yes, I suspect that but how difficult was it to write in comparison with writing

biography of others more difficult I suspect.

I never intended to write it. I thought I might write an essay or something like that after

my parents' death and I started away and suddenly I found myself going on and on as if it was a book that

needed to be written. I then found after the first draft that I had to go back and do a lot of research about myself.

I thought at one time of writing a letter to newspapers and asking for any information about

myself, which might help.

You say needed to be written? your need perhaps? My need. I

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