Based on a True Story

By: Anthony Holden

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Synopsis: From poker to poetry, poisoners to princes, opera to the Oscars, Shakespeare to Olivier, Mozart to Murdoch, Anthony Holden seems to have rolled many writers&’ lives into one. Author of 35 books on a &‘crazy&’ range of subjects, this cocky Lancashire lad-turned-bohemian citizen of the world has led an apparently charmed life from Merseyside to Buckingham Palace, the White House and beyond. As he turns 70, the award-winning journalist and biographer – grandson of an England footballer, son of a seaside shopkeeper, friend of the famous from Princess Diana to Peter O'Toole, Mick Jagger to Salman Rushdie – spills the beans on showbiz names to literary sophisticates, rock stars to royals as he looks back whimsically and wittily on a richly varied, anecdote- and action-packed career – concluding, in the words of Robert Louis Stevenson, that &‘Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well&’.