Eminent Victorians is a groundbreaking work of biography that raised the genre to the level of high art. It replaced reverence with skepticism and Strachey's wit, iconoclasm, and narrative skill liberated the biographical enterprise. His portraits of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Ar[...]
"Eminent Victorians" marked an epoch in the art of biography; it also helped to crack the old myths of high Victorianism and to usher in a new spirit by which chauvinism, hypocrisy and the stiff upper lip were debunked. In it, Strachey cleverly exposes the self-seeking ambitions of Cardinal Manning [...]
When Michael Holroyd's life of Strachey appeared in 1967, it changed the course of modern biography, setting a new standard for the recounting of literary lives and launching the enduring Bloomsbury revival. In the 1960s, however, many of Strachey's friends and lovers were still alive; much could no[...]
When Michael Holroyd's life of Strachey first appeared in the late 1960s, it was hailed as a landmark in contemporary biography. Drawing on new material, published and unpublished, Holroyd completely revised and rewrote his masterwork in 1995 to tell the full story of this complex man and his world [...]
While working on his two-volume biography of Lytton Strachey, Michael Holroyd had access to the Strachey archives. From the same source he collected all Strachey's diaries and memoirs, which together in this volume form an intermittent but not disconnected autobiography. From childhood diaries to th[...]
Lytton Strachey, genius, wit, iconoclast, biographer, pacifist, and homosexual campaigner, was at the nexus of the literary and artistic life of Bloomsbury. In the 1960s, he was seen as a progenitor of the hippy cult. Now he appears as a far more subversive and challenging figure. He revolutionised [...]
"Den engelska reformationen var inte enbart en religiös omvälvning, den fick också social betydelse."»Den engelska reformationen var inte enbart en religiös omvälvning, den fick också social betydelse." Stracheys porträtt av Jungfrudrottningen i Elizabeth och Essex (1928) har blivit accep[...]