Narrative drive

Michael Holroyd describes this tiny, charmingly pointless publication (On Wheels, Chatto, £9.99) not as a book but as an example of ‘nostalgic intertextuality’, which is a grand way of saying that it is a bit of this and a bit of that. The this is the part cars have played in his family’s history and the that is the part they have played in the lives of the famous biographer’s famous subjects.

We learn that Holroyd’s father liked to drive his Zodiac with his miniature German police dog on his lap, and that the author’s wife Margaret Drabble ‘plumbed a special telephone into her car’.Lytton Strachey bought a car for his beloved Ralph Partridge, but failed to win the sexual favours he sought; Virginia Woolf’s conversation with Edward VII’s mistress Alice Keppel flagged until the two women discovered a mutual knowledge of motor-car mechanisms; and the Augustus John family all drove enthusiastically: ‘accidents were plentiful’.

The best chapter, not entirely surprisingly, is on Bernard Shaw (pictured above), who not only biked, motorcycled and drove with vigour and without fear, but also wrote about his experiences in doing so. Whatever one’s opinion of GBS as a playwright, his adventures as a motorist perhaps deserve a little tome of this sort all to themselves, with Michael Holroyd at the wheel.