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). Though the book concludes with ‘the journalist’s perennially optimistic sign-off… more follows later’, the closing pages are elegiac, as Holden contemplates, from his retirement home, the recent deaths of many of his contemporaries.

He has more contemporaries than most to lose. Between childhood and old age, Holden goes everywhere and meets everyone who is anyone. His memoir is long, but there is still barely room for the breathless list of jobs and books and schemes. The personal is peripheral: his two marriages take place strictly in the margins of this glorified ego-file.

Holden casts himself as a chimeric cat with many lives, lapping up literary lunches and always landing on his feet. His translation of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon was published before he left university. As editor of Oxford’s Isis — owned at the time by Robert Maxwell, who once locked Holden in his sauna for a joke — he was the first person to publish Christopher Hitchens.