Strachey, Lytton Archives | Slightly Foxed

Eminent Victorians, [33] 77; Elizabeth and Essex, [52] 24

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Lytton’s Characteristic Specimen

Ariane Bankes on Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians

Rereading ‘The End of General Gordon’, the fourth of Lytton Strachey’s portraits in Eminent Victorians (1918), is an awful reminder of our failure to learn from history. Gordon’s and Gladstone’s ill-fated machinations in the Sudan are so redolent of Britain’s recent misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq as almost to take one’s breath away: substitute either country for Khartoum, and you have an example fearsome enough to deter any but the most fatuous sabre-rattler from going near the place, let alone attempting to influence its political fate from thousands of miles away.

That Essex Boy

Michael Holroyd on Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex

‘The natural pleasure of reading it is enormous,’ wrote Maynard Keynes to his friend Lytton Strachey on coming to the end of Elizabeth and Essex. ‘You seem, on the whole, to imagine yourself as Elizabeth, but I see from the pictures that it is Essex whom you have got up as yourself. But I expect you have managed to get the best of both worlds.’

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