Word: holroyd
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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LYTTON STRACHEY, by Michael Holroyd. The madly eccentric life and odd times of the author of Eminent Victorians, overwhelmingly documented in 1,229 improbably fascinating pages...
LYTTON STRACHEY, by Michael Holroyd. The author of Eminent Victorians was undoubtedly the oddest duck on the Bloomsbury pond, a fact amply documented on nearly every one of the 1,229 fascinating pages of this two-volume biography...
Lugubrious Comedy. Holroyd is thorough and judiciously appreciative in his treatment of Strachey's work, but he reserves his full concentration for the egomaniacal oddball himself. The biographer was given access, by Strachey's brother James, to 30,000 letters that flowed between Lytton, his family and his Bloomsbury intimates. In his letters, he disgorged himself of the full, untidy range of his lusts, ambitions, despair, sickness, vanity and, best of all, his maliciously acute observations of the people and places he knew. The letters alone make an overwhelming self-portrait, and to them Holroyd adds a detailed...
Wherever possible, Holroyd allows Strachey to speak for himself, whether he was dropping Bloomsbury epigrams (on T. S. Eliot: "I fear it will take him a long time to become a letter writer"), or taking his place as the boldest public wit since Wilde. Strachey never hesitated to flaunt his homosexual inclina tions. His finest moment may have come during his court hearing as a conscientious objector in 1916, when he was asked what he would do if he saw a German soldier raping his sister. Strachey paused two beats, then remarked: "I would try to interpose my own body...
...Holroyd notes in his preface that "it may seem ironic that the life and work of Lytton Strachey should finally be commemorated by two fat volumes-that standard treatment of the illustrious dead that he was so effective in stamping out." Ironic it is, but not half so much as it would have been if his biographer had followed Strachey's example and given short shrift to one of the best subjects of this century...