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 starting 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 Dinesen 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.

Basil Street Blues is a memoir marked by humor gentle iron, and a deeply sympathetic understanding of human failings Its most interesting portrait is that of the author himself, the keeper of such an extravagant heritage.