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“... lover when Angelica was born. ‘Its beauty is the remarkable thing about it,’ Garnett wrote to Lytton Strachey soon after her birth. ‘I think of marrying it; when she is twenty I shall be 46 – will it be scandalous?’ He did marry her and it does still seem scandalous, or like something in a fairy tale, the curse or promise delivered over the ...”

“... we take Bloomsbury too seriously. Virginia Woolf has become an icon, academically hagiographic. Lytton Strachey, on the other hand, is out because he is not in our sense a serious writer – deliberately not, one would have supposed. Things have come to the point where we are in danger of not understanding what Bloomsbury was all about: especially not ...”

“... even evokes the names of other letter-writers already enshrined in volume form – Carlyle, whom Lytton Strachey said was ‘too long’, and Swift, whom the same authority qualified, with characteristic wrong-headedness one may think, or indeed impertinence, as ‘too dry’. These two are going to be amusing. It is hard to avoid the impression that ...”

“... portrait as it is from the travesty figures cooked up by the pseudo-novelist biographer like Lytton Strachey. Stoicism with Duff Cooper was a very different affair from what it was with the Duchesse de Guermantes, but the two would have got on, and understood each other, for he was not at all like Swann and even less like Proust himself. A literary ...”

“... obstinately went on teaching in Sunday School. Was Gosse, then, homosexual? Asked this question, Lytton Strachey replied: ‘No, but he’s Hamo-sexual.’ Sassoon (who was Thornycroft’s nephew) agreed with this. Mrs Thwaite relegates to a note her own eminently sensible belief that ‘the confession of strong feelings at one period for one person of ...”

“... in which there is ‘a pervading lack of daily joy’. He blames the Bloomsbury Group, especially Lytton Strachey; the disillusioned war memoirs of Graves and Sassoon; the ‘self-hating cultural elite’ of John Osborne, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin; the libertarian narcissism of the 1960s; Paul Watson’s 1974 BBC series about the Wilkins clan, The ...”

“... to Cambridge and charmed everyone he met. He was painted by Duncan Grant and gushingly admired by Lytton Strachey, while Virginia Woolf thought he had ‘a head like a Greek god’. He performed in plays alongside Rupert Brooke and was the model for George Emerson in Forster’s A Room with a View. And he was a great rock climber, perhaps the best. He ...”

“... the examples quoted by Ellis – it is difficult to understand why not. Meryon was no Boswell (Lytton Strachey characterised him as ‘a poor-spirited and muddle-headed man’), but one would have thought that in his six biggish volumes at least a glimpse of her brilliance might have shone through. He was troubled by this himself. Looking through his ...”

“... In 1979, Piers Brendon took this approach further. Sixty years earlier, in Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey had exposed 19th-century mores in four sharp, elegant biographical essays. Now Brendon repeated the trick with Eminent Edwardians, Northcliffe serving as his first and most apposite subject. Brendon presented him and his newspapers as mainly ...”

“... urbanely when he observes that ‘the boy was never far below the surface of the man.’ Or, as Lytton Strachey more astringently put it, ‘it’s odd that the Provost of Eton should still be aged 16.’ Or, again, as Monty himself, in his 60th year, declared to McBryde’s widow: ‘The truth is I am a very immature creature, with not much clearer ...”

“... de Paris even if I had known that luncheon was served there. He talked non-stop over lunch. ‘Now Lytton Strachey, he wrote in clichés – but clichés of good pedigree,’ and he chuckled as he said so, apparently pleased with the term. He was a generous critic, and he was generous to me when, later on, he proposed his collected writings on Shaw to ...”

“... today, have to come to this biography with some sense of the way in which eminent Victorians – Lytton Strachey toyed with the idea of including Sidgwick among his victims – suffered agonies of doubt about almost everything other than the virtues of the upper-middle-class intelligentsia. Sidgwick was a very Victorian thinker; he was born the year ...”

“... when he’s insensible, or even, sometimes, in hospital. Michael Holroyd, working on his book on Lytton Strachey, went to interview Green about Ottoline Morrell, whom he’d known well, of course, like most of those more flamboyant contemporaries who were figuring in new Lives: ‘Dig received him politely, picking her way gracefully over a ...”

“... literary figures, Kipling, Barrie and Buchan, none of whom was liked by their hosts, as well as Lytton Strachey and Hilaire Belloc, who were more popular. Royalty also figured: the occasional Austrian archduke, the Queen of Romania, Queen Victoria’s third son, the Duke of Connaught, and less frequently King Edward VII. Rose quotes one of Nancy’s ...”

“... and clasped hands. More remarkable, if not so successful in totality, are Bell’s paintings of Lytton Strachey and David Garnett, from 1913 and 1915. The former’s glasses and beard are painted bright yellow in a strange experiment; the latter, a topless portrait, has a mother-of-pearl luminescence to its skin tones, the small dark dots of ...”