A book of secrets : illegitimate daughters, absent fathers

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Early in this gem of a book, Michael Holroyd points out that it marks the last volume in his confessions of an elusive biographer, a trilogy that began with his memoir Basil Street Blues and then, in Mosaic, moved sideways to explore two enigmatic women interlaced in the family tapestry. Here, the links with earlier volumes are all thematic and the elusiveness is hardly the biographer's alone. Life itself, this consummate writer of lives shows us, is slippery and mysterious. ... Reading this book is a little like walking through a hall of mirrors into the final party of Proust's great opus. -- Lisa Appignanesi, The Observer, 31 October 2010On a hill above the Italian village of Ravello stands the Villa Cimbrone a place of fantasy and make-believe. The characters that move through Michael Holroyd's book are destined never to meet as they lived through different eras and reside in different countries. Yet the Villa Cimbrone unites them all.