Anthony Holden is nostalgic for journalism’s good old bad old days

After a career spanning 50 years, 40 books and about a million parties, Anthony Holden has written a memoir. Based on a True Story is bookended by touching accounts of his childhood and old age. Born in 1947, Holden grew up in Southport. His adored grandfather, Ivan Sharpe, played football for England, winning gold at the 1912 Olympics. In later life he was a sports writer, and would take the young Holden to the press box at Liverpool or Everton, tasking him with noting down the game’s statistics. Holden dates his journalistic ambitions to the early thrill of ‘seeing my numbers in print in the very next day’s edition of the Sunday Times’.

In 2017, Holden suffered a stroke that left him wheelchair-bound. His warmly good-humoured account of the tedious road to partial recovery gives a sense of a man much loved by his friends and his three sons (by his first wife, the translator and librettist Amanda Holden, who died in September).