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Reading the Border Ballads in his late teens, \"it was less the human beings in them that stirred my imagination than the black night and brief gray day in which they moved, the bare moors and fierce or wailing wind and the endless sea beyond.\" Later he grew more vulnerable to human passions expressed with truth and intensity; their necessity and danger: \"the uprush of agony after the stupefaction of loss\", for example, in 'Clerk Saunders'. Tastes change with time. HG Wells, \"the Janus-faced Little Man, who looked forward with a fixed glance at a world swept clean of everything which was hurting him in the present, also looked backwards in regret and humorous affection at all that had moved him in the past, the hopes and formless aspirations and comforting illusions of Mr [Polly], and the 'other dreams' which are the theme of 'The Sea Lady' and which, as the elder Ponderevo lies dying after the collapse of his worldly triumph, gleam fitfully in his fading consciousness\".

Looking back it seems to me I was extremely fortunate to be writing biographies during what has been described as a golden age for the genre. It began with George Painter's Life of Proust and Richard Ellmann's James Joyce at the end of the 50s. They gained for literary biography in particular a measure of intellectual respectability, if not a secure academic status. Joyce's monstrous and much-feared \"biografiend\" seemed largely to retreat from view and the trade winds of fashion carried us along very agreeably. Why are the British so focused on the individual life in portraiture as well as in literature? I like to believe it is because we live on an island and, not being attached to the mainland of Europe, do not view the past so readily in collective terms. The most memorable prizegiving ceremony I went to this year was the James Tait Black event at the Edinburgh festival. It was held at a large tent sponsored by the Royal Bank of Scotland. I wasn't sure what omen this might suggest. A fierce storm preceded the ceremony, the lights suddenly went out and the microphones died. Then we went in. For 20 minutes the audience waited in the dark. Finally, to stifle the rising murmur of frustration, I was named the biography winner and summoned to give a reading with the aid of a small torch supplied by Ian Rankin. It was a heroic, not to say poignant performance. Once or twice I made a dramatic gesture at which the thin beam of torchlight left the page altogether and disappeared. I could sense my voice dying away a couple of yards from my mouth. I breathed deeply and gave it all I had. At one moment I read the words \"she whispered\" yelling it out at top blast and feeling that some of the subtlety was leaking away into the night. Sebastian Barry, who won the fiction prize, did rather better, dancing a precarious duet with Rankin who held the torch over his shoulder.

He uses brilliant research skills - honed over 30 years since he wrote his first biography, of the writer Hugh Kingsmill - to track down the details of birth, death, marriage, progeny and the good and bad bits in between. He tramped the streets looking for the homes of relatives long dead, much as he had tramped the streets in Russia and New Zealand in search of the facts of episodes in the life of George Bernard Shaw. Holroyd's own parents split up and between them married five times. The instability of his home life made little [Michael Holroyd] fearful and anxious. He was a bookworm and was sent to Eton. His father pushed him to study sciences at university, the basis for a steady job he read about in the new industries. Michael disagreed (\"In maths, I couldn't, and still can't, understand what 'x' is\") and instead tried law. A bit-part character in the Kingsmill book was biographer and critic Lytton Strachey, with whom Holroyd became fascinated. Strachey became his next subject, and Augustus John, a friend of Strachey's, was the next.

I came across [Hugh Kingsmill]'s biography of Frank Harris by accident. It was a masterpiece of irony, and made me laugh in a way I never had before. I laughed at the comedy of life I was engaged in, and found a new humour. I decided to write a book about Kingsmill, which appeared in 1964. I may say now that it was an immensely bad book. It was a labour of infatuation and I learnt a bit like a skater - falling down and picking myself up. Kingsmill was a follower of [Lytton Strachey], who became the subject of my next biography. I came along at a very fortunate time with that. Before then, homosexuality was not treated frankly or with openness. I wasn't doing a brave expose, I was just dealing with it, but for once I was in tune with the spirit of the time. I wanted the things he did to be as important on paper as they were in his own life.

Is there such a thing, then, as a definitive biography? The value of his [George Bernard Shaw], [Michael Holroyd] says, comes not only from its access to new and unpublished correspondence or diaries, but in the chemistry of the collaboration between writer and subject, Michael Holroyd and G.B.S. \"Now, nobody knows if that collaboration is going to work. What is new is my imagination. I am different from G.K. Chesterton, who wrote a book on Shaw, and from Hesketh Pearson. And I would like to think that the virtue of not having the idea of a definitive biography of anyone is that subjects can be recreated for modern times.\" Nerves play on the instinct of any writer; there are other threats as well, often hidden and then suddenly revealed. For Mr. Holroyd there was the danger that he might drown under the sheer tide of resources. Shaw's was, he believes, \"a most extraordinary life, in all its limitations and strengths,\" but he can't allow that single sentiment to write the biography. \"What I must be on guard against is not aggrandizing my subject because I have to commit so much time to him. So I've tried to give people who disagreed with Shaw -- G.K. Chesterton or H.G. Wells -- good lines, lines against Shaw, to make a proper debate. So there's no right or wrong, but you want something dramatic to happen and to divide readers to some extent, as long as it's something reasonable.\" As for what happens after Shaw is finished, Mr. Holroyd says he hasn't been accosted yet by a minor character wanting the next biography. He doesn't know, in fact, whether there will be another one. The final Shaw volume is now being written and is due out in 1991. After that he is committed to compiling a three-volume set of Shaw chronology, itinerary, notes and companion-pieces to the plays. But before he launches into those, he's promised himself a good, long holiday. In the meantime he makes sure that his life isn't overrun by Shaw, like him or not. \"I do think that I could spend a week with someone without that person knowing that I was writing about Shaw,\" he says. \"There are other aspects of life. I do not want to become a G.B.S. bore.\"&