Word: lytton
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...tears, Mother Nightingale had confided to a friend: "We are ducks who have hatched a wild swan." It was no swan, as Lytton Strachey noted in his famous biographical essay, "it was an eagle." But Strachey-could never fathom Miss Nightingale either, because he himself, a brilliant and heretical writer, put no stock in God or goodness. The best Strachey could do was to guess that Florence Nightingale was in the clutch of a demonic spirit...
...since a lot of people proved to be curious about romantic poets, Maurois soon had a hit on his hands. With this encouragement he turned out polished and readable, and somewhat empty lives of Disraeli, Byron and Dickens. Reread today, such Maurois works seem pretty thin; where the peerless Lytton (Eminent Victorians) Strachey was genuinely witty, Maurois was merely suave; where Strachey conveyed the quality and texture of a period, Maurois lacquered his work with the weary irony of the worldly boulevardier...