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“... brothel-keeper, convicted perpetrator of various acts of violence against women, and playwright). Lytton Strachey, it’s true, wasn’t keen. In ‘Shakespeare’s Final Period’ (published in Books and Characters, 1922) he wrote that the last plays just showed that in his latter years Shakespeare was ‘bored with people, bored with real life, bored ...”

“... own wild hearts.’ But she was never as enthusiastic about the Ballets Russes as Roger Fry, or Lytton Strachey, or Maynard Keynes, who married Lydia Lopokova and launched the Camargo Society, which was influential in the development of ballet in Britain. Nor did she much like the Poiret-influenced clothes Vanessa Bell designed for Omega, remonstrating ...”

“... I’ve seen my brothers and what’s happened to them, and it’s sickening to think of. Lytton Strachey​ was trying, in vain as it turned out, to dissuade his latest fancy, Bernard Swithinbank, from going out to India. Stracheys galore had staffed the Raj throughout the 19th century, and Lytton’s dearest ...”

“... the many years of my devoted if ineffective Anglophilia. This woman considers Michael Holroyd’s Lytton Strachey as the ne plus ultra of distinguished necrophilia. And it is true that as soon as one moves towards the perception of biography as the symptom of such a disorder it becomes difficult to find a more flamboyant instance – though there’s ...”

“... something of what both the Woolfs meant, but from this distance perhaps the most striking of the Strachey family characteristics is their sheer, unshakeable confidence. For the older generation this resided in Britain’s ‘imperial project’. Jane Strachey’s life, as she told a luncheon at the Lyceum Club in ...”

“... in memory. It is a breathing, flawed thing. In Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History (1928), Lytton Strachey collapsed this passage into an unforgettable final vignette of Francis Bacon: ‘an old man, disgraced, shattered, alone, on Highgate Hill, stuffing a dead fowl with snow’. Strachey, serenely unworried ...”

“... of Franz Liszt by Alan Walker.* I was also reading – for amusement – the biography of Lytton Strachey by Michael Holroyd and one of Dorothy Parker by Marion Meade. In Holroyd’s book, I was most struck by some portraits – reproduced in full colour – that had been done of Strachey; there’s one by ...”

“... the most enduring achievement of the Victorian age. The incident is remarkable because the man was Lytton Strachey and he wasn’t joking. No Bloomsbury raspberry here. The famous debunker of eminent Victorians was handing out a bouquet to the most eminently Victorian of them all. He’d been hooked ever since he’d first seen Iolanthe in 1907. ‘It’s ...”

“... in happy Catholic wedlock at last. Is all this movement indeed ‘ridiculous’? As ridiculous as Lytton Strachey would have believed it when he published Eminent Victorians in 1918, offering a new generation the comic spectacle of confused earnestness deceiving itself and others? Here is the son of the greater Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby, a man ...”

“... 22 February 1855. These are the men who had survived the harrowing winter of 1854, when what Lytton Strachey described as ‘the endless ramifications of administrative incapacity’ left 13,000 men on the sick lists and the nation scandalised. The queen might be blameless, but the government was not. Gilbert’s painting isn’t irenic, it’s an ...”

“... This is a mood to be remembered when we think of Forster as almost comically mild, so that Lytton Strachey labelled him ‘the taupe’ and Virginia Woolf wished he would be more open so that one could require him to ‘stand and deliver’; or when we read in P.N. Furbank’s biography of strange outbreaks of solitary violence, when he hurled ...”

“... and during a nervous breakdown he had in 1912 he blamed women, Jews and homosexuals – Lytton Strachey in particular – for much that was wrong with the world, an episode that neither Marsh nor Mrs Brooke would have seen a need to publicise. In Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography (1992), Ian Hamilton quotes ...”

“... Newsome, Annan himself, Michael Holroyd and Hermione Lee on the Wilberforces, Leslie Stephen, Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf, you’re likely to know what’s coming before you’ve turned the page – and there’s a limit to the appeal even of Clapham psychodrama and Bloomsbury libido. But some of the literary evidence he’s tracked down ...”

“... Keynes (for being a renegade Eton-and-King’s man who thought the college needed shaking up). Lytton Strachey returned James’s contempt: ‘It’s odd that the provost of Eton should still be aged 16. A life without a jolt.’ The only modern innovations that I can discover James adopting were the rear-driven safety cycle and the Dunlop pneumatic ...”

“... theatre design, so Michael Holroyd in 1967 revolutionised the writing of biography with Lytton Strachey, which extended the biographer’s reach from the public to the private, from the work to the man, from the study to the bedroom. In doing so, he breached the border between the documented and the speculative, and blurred the distinction ...”