AustLit

'‘It is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one,’ Lytton Strachey observed in his Eminent Victorians. ‘Those two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead—who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design?’ Strachey was a man on a mission from Bloomsbury to puncture the hypocrisy of Victorian forebears. His deadly caricatures of General Gordon and Florence Nightingale almost killed off the doubledecker biography, at least until Michael Holroyd’s biography of Strachey himself miraculously revived it.' (Introduction)