"Not long before his parents died in the 1980s, Michael Holroyd asked them to write some account of their early lives.". "A biographer by profession, Holroyd had always assumed that his own family was perfectly English, or at least perfectly ordinary. But old photograph albums, papers found in the lining of an evening bag and crumbling documents in various public record offices gradually yield clues to a constellation of startling events and eccentric characters: a long, slow decline from English nobility on one side, and on the other a dramatic Scandinavian ancestry that could have been imagined by Isak Dineson. Fatal fires, suicides, bankruptcies, divorces, unconsummated longings, and the rumor of a fabulous Indian tea fortune ... all these flow from the pages of his parents' recollections, to which he adds his own."--BOOK JACKET.