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“... It is odd that Lytton Strachey did not manage to strike up much fellow-feeling for Prospero. In an essay of 1904 on Shakespeare’s final period we find the puncturing remark (uncharacteristic of later deflationary measures only in the diffidence of the opening phrase): ‘To an irreverent eye, the ex-Duke of Milan would perhaps appear as an unpleasantly crusty personage, in whom a twelve years’ monopoly of the conversation had developed an inordinate propensity for talking ...”

“... in Taviton Street and, principally, her meeting with Ralph Partridge and involvement with the Lytton Strachey-Partridge-Carrington ménage at Ham Spray. And that is the trouble: we are offered a kind of Bloomsbury ‘Jennifer’s Diary’, with Raymond and Saxon and Maynard and James and Alix and Clive and Roger and the rest flitting through the ...”

“... Rather in the role of what are coming to be known as ‘guest artists’, room is also found for Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf. All these, together with Annie Besant, turn out to be goodies or near goodies, and over against them, as chief baddy, is Aleister Crowley, variously described as ‘the high priest of post-Edwardian mysticism’ and ‘the ...”

“... and is all for ‘the irradiation of an epoch by means of sharp biographical vignettes’ in the Lytton Strachey tradition. ‘The camera’s lens reflects verisimilitude,’ he writes, ‘whereas the prism of the artist’s imagination refracts truth.’ Is refracted truth a good thing? If it is refracted, is it still truth? One is reminded of the ...”

“... Lytton Strachey loved reading letters, including the published kind, but after glancing at a few sentences of George Meredith’s correspondence in 1912, he felt ‘so nauseated’, he told Virginia Woolf, that he shut the book at once: Is it prejudice, do you think, that makes us hate the Victorians, or is it the truth of the case? They seem to me to be a set of mouthing bungling hypocrites; but perhaps really there is a baroque charm about them which will be discovered by our great-great-grandchildren, as we have discovered the charm of Donne, who seemed intolerable to the 18th century ...”

“... as congenial, he sought consolation by correspondence with his Cambridge friends, especially Lytton Strachey. Later on, he wrote a multitude of letters as editor, publisher and politician. So it is not remarkable that in the course of his life he wrote thousands of them. We still do that, even nowadays, in an age of reduced epistolary ...”

“... to publish it. The story was Olivia; the author, anonymous on publication in 1949, was Dorothy Strachey Bussy, Lytton Strachey’s sister. Olivia is a piece of spirited homage, by a woman both spirited and prone to homage. Dorothy Strachey had some of her brother’s ...”

“... to Goode, this is a work of genius. But it sounds suspiciously like one of those biographies that Lytton Strachey suspected the undertaker of composing as the final part of his job. Sure enough, the book turns out to contain a photograph of a bust of Florence Nightingale. A little later there is an echo of Strachey’s ...”

“... television Mr A.N. Wilson approaches the eminent Victorians in a manner far different from that of Lytton Strachey seventy years ago. In 1918 Strachey intended to blow up, once and for all, the stale and inhibiting pieties of his parents and their generation. When the Oxford historian G.M. Young read Eminent Victorians ...”

“... to embrace almost the entire political nation. Among the Left intelligentsia, the patriotism which Strachey had so successfully sought to destroy had been replaced by a primary loyalty to Stalin.’ There is an exasperated tension in Mr Johnson’s beliefs and the excitement keeps the narrative going, however unbalanced the judgments become. In fact, Keynes ...”

“... and Brooke himself ‘jealous, moody, ill-balanced’. There was a suggestion that James Strachey should write ‘something for us to print [at the Hogarth Press]. He’s sending us the letters to look at.’ Strachey had offered a review – it never appeared – to the Cambridge Magazine: ‘I knew him better ...”

“... The best thing on Stendhal in English is an essay by Lytton Strachey in which he remarks the way the author denovelises the novel while skilfully retaining all its traditional apparatus. Stendhal’s imagination is a kind of parody of Scott’s: his sensibility is itself its own journal and his own memoir. Reviewing Stendhal’s last book, The Charterhouse of Parma, when it appeared in 1839, Balzac noted admiringly that the novel ‘often contained a whole book in a single page ...”

“... it that was so peculiarly attractive about being at Ham Spray, the house left to the Partridges by Lytton Strachey? The answers lie in these diaries. First, there was her way of looking at nature, turning it into the nourishing visual feast which (for me) living in the country is all about: I went to meet the Kees on the morning train. The station was ...”

“... When Lytton Strachey looked back at the ‘apotheosis’ of Queen Victoria’s final years in his biography of 1921, he could only wonder at the disparity between the ‘dazzled imagination of her subjects’ and the unimaginative woman who had somehow inspired them. While ‘Victoria soared aloft towards the regions of divinity through a nimbus of purest glory,’ as Strachey put it, no one appeared to realise how inadequate she was to her symbolic task: That the nation’s idol was a very incomplete representative of the nation was a circumstance that was hardly noticed, and yet it was conspicuously true ...”

“... July 1914), and Forster was offered £25 by his publisher as an advance for a book about Butler. Lytton Strachey, who also found Butler immensely ‘cheering’, wanted to write on him in the Edinburgh Review; and Forster, who acknowledged himself as chief among the liberated, chose Erewhon for a radio talk on ‘books that have influenced me’. There ...”