Word: strachey
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...MAUROIS has chosen for his subjects under the title "Prophets and Poets" those contemporary English writers who "have played an important part in the spiritual moulding of one or two generations of human beings." These essays on the life and thought of Kipling, Wells, Shaw, Chesterton, Conrad, Strachey, Lawrence, Huxley, and Katherine Mansfield were first delivered as lectures to French audiences, and most of them suffer from the exigencies of their original purpose. Again and again an indigestibly large amount of biographical data is crammed into a study, followed by a series of extracts from the work of the writer...
Much more congenial subjects for M. Maurois' pen are Lytton Strachey, Aldous Huxley, and Katherine Mansfield. His account of the way in which Strachey "reinstated Cllo among the Muses" is illuminating; and though he is delighted when Strachey in such portraits as "Lady Hester Stanhope" makes history seem "almost like a symbolist poem," he is aware that the truest history is never to be found in such portraits. On the interference of too much scientific knowledge and a too scientific point of view in the fiction of Huxley, M. Maurois is very just. And his analysis and estimate...
Something should be said in praise of the physical handsomeness of the book and the unhackneyed portraits of the authors used as illustrations. The book is almost worth owning for Henry Lamb's remarkable portrait of Strachey. On the other hand, there is much unaccountable carelessness in the text; the name of the pilgrim ship in "Lord Jim" is the "Patna," not the "Patria;" the protagonist of "Antic Hay" is Gumbril, not Gombauld; D. H. Lawrence died and was buried at Vence, in the South of France, not at Venice...
...NATURE OF CAPITALIST CRISIS-John Strachey-Covici, Friede...
Since Maurois has frequently been hailed as the carrier of the tradition of Lytton Strachey, his portrait of that biographer is the most revealing in Prophets and Poets. He quotes enough of Strachey's witty and unexpected prose to establish convincingly the difference between the master's light touch and his own methodical, hard-working style. The sketch ends with an account of Maurois' meeting with Strachey: "On the first day we were alarmed by his tall, lanky frame, his long beard, his immobility, his silence; but when he spoke ... it was in delightful, economical epigrams...