Quote #5
It is not [the biographer's] business to be complimentary; it is his business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them...dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior motives.
More from Lytton Strachey
- It is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one.
- His style is perfect joy, and it is only when one has come across a fairer and kindlier handling of one of his victims that one is resentfu…
- The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - …
- One observed a number of discordant features - a feminine sensibility, a delight in the absurd, a taste for exaggeration and melodrama, a v…
- If this is dying, then I don't think much of it.
- Pass a person through your mind, with all the documents, and see what comes out. That seems to be your method. Also, choose them, in the fi…
- [His reply to the chairman's other stock question, which had previously never failed to embarrass the claimant: 'Tell me, Mr. Strachey, wha…
- To mark a man's faults and failings was, for Johnson, to indicate where he had diverged from his true relation to God; for Strachey it was …