Lytton Strachey was born 1 March 1880, and died 21 January 1932.
Eight Quotes
- A writer’s promise is like a tiger’s smile.
- There is something dark and wintry about the atmosphere of the later Middle Ages.
- As usual, it struck me that letters were the only really satisfactory form of literature. They give one the facts so amazingly, don’t they? I felt when I got to the end that I’d lived for years in that set. But oh dearie me I am glad that I’m not in it!
- It is probably always disastrous not to be a poet.
- For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian──ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection that unattainable by the highest art.
- Discretion is not the better part of biography.
- There was hardly an eminent writer in Paris who was unacquainted with the inside of the Conciergerie or the Bastille.
- The amateur is very rare in French literature – as rare as he is common in our own.
Lytton Strachey was a British writer, critic and founding member of the Bloomsbury Group. His book, Eminent Victorians, established a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit. He was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Queen Victoria.
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