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“... Desmond MacCarthy, Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, the Woolfs, Lytton Strachey and Forster. Mary Hutchinson and Sydney Waterlow were also invited but fell by the wayside. Even by Bloomsbury standards it was an exclusive set. The members were all related by blood or marriage or, which weighed more heavily with some of ...”

“... was this woman Carrington?’ She derived her importance from the fact that she lived with Lytton Strachey. Hostesses, he went on, like the Asquiths and Lady Colefax, who welcomed Strachey, ‘would no more have invited Carrington than the cook’. Knowing her very well, he thought she was a complex and original ...”

“... they were painted as abstract shapes with broken angles. Carrington’s portrait of her companion Lytton Strachey, also made in 1916, which hangs on the wall perpendicular to La Patrie, is a shocking, almost offensive contrast to it. The men in Nevinson’s painting are lying on the ground either dead or in agony. ...”

“... In Elizabethan drama the king’s two bodies might well be a theme for tragedy, and a latterday Lytton Strachey might have made much of the hypocritical discrepancies between public eminence and private person. J.E. Morpurgo has settled for ‘paradox’. His biography-cum-house-history evokes a constant sense of how odd it was that such a man should ...”

“... of the India Office and his extra-departmental interests. ‘Yes,’ he affirmed to his friend Lytton Strachey, ‘I am a clerk in the India Office – having passed the medical with flying colours, balls and eyesight unusually perfect they said.’ It is, as it happens, after 1920 that Keynes’s career acquires more interest for those concerned with ...”

“... peaking between 1890 and 1914, and it is impossible not to be interested in what Russell, Keynes, Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster, Wittgenstein and G.E. Moore made of each other. For another thing, some of them had an extraordinary impact on the intellectual and political life of Britain for much of the 20th century; philosophers still work in the shadow ...”

“... Early in this century, people who read Lytton Strachey, and liked to think of themselves as modern, prided themselves on lacking a sense of Sin. Nowadays people who read Michel Foucault, and who use the term ‘Post Modern’ with a straight face, pride themselves on not believing in Truth. Strachey and Foucault, the Moderns and the Post-Moderns, share a distaste for romance, for utopian social hope ...”

“... neither the seriousness nor the intelligence to warrant the attention he demanded. According to Lytton Strachey, whom he met at Cambridge, Bell’s character had several layers: there was ‘the country gentleman layer’, ‘the Paris decadent layer’, ‘the 18th-century layer’, ‘the layer of innocence’ and the ‘layer of ...”

“... Suddenly the Victorians have become controversial again. This is not because a new Lytton Strachey has sprung up in our midst, but because Mrs Thatcher – who polarises public opinion more forcibly than any prime minister since Gladstone – appropriates ‘Victorian values’ for herself and her party: ‘those were the values when our country became great,’ she told Brian Walden three years ago ...”

“... the plucking out of harsh views on friends and fellow writers (as with Leonard Woolf’s and James Strachey’s edition of Virginia Woolf’s correspondence with Lytton Strachey) was inevitable. The truth is that Murry added nothing to Katherine’s writing that was not already there, that he made her popular, and that ...”

“... Will the history of the Victorian age ever be written? Lytton Strachey was emphatic that it wouldn’t. It will never be written, he declared in the preface to Eminent Victorians, because we know too much about it. Neither a Ranke nor a Gibbon could master the vast ocean of material bequeathed by those prolific generations ...”

“... away’, they were wrong. It did not. They were unlucky. In 1911 in a moment of boredom Lytton Strachey, for lack of other reading, picked it up. He was fascinated. As he read on, he saw a splendid opportunity to debunk a Victorian saint. In Eminent Victorians (1918), that entertaining quartet of brilliantly written pen-portraits, he made the ...”

“... Randolph Churchill, their reputation was safer in their son’s hands than in their own. Although Lytton Strachey assailed such pious pomposity by showing that the slenderest of books could sometimes be the weightiest, and that eminence was not necessarily next to Godliness, these pantheons in print were still being constructed on a lavish scale until ...”

“... have been included, if only because of when it was written. Another, of 21 May 1919, answers Lytton Strachey, who had asked if Eliot would reply if he wrote to him: ‘Don’t be absurd – of course I should answer,’ it reads. The eight other letters are mostly longer, but still total only 196 words. Surely it might have been better to exclude ...”

“... When I signed the contract for my Life of Lytton Strachey, I was allowed by way of an advance on royalties the sum of 50 pounds. Though this reflected my own lack of status as a biographer, it was also, I think, some measurement of where Bloomsbury stood in the scheme of things. Twenty-five years ago, Strachey’s books were not in paperback and Virginia Woolf was not the feminist idol she has since become ...”