Giles Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) was an English biographer and critic known for his satire of the Victorian Era. Lytton Strachey was born in London on March 1, 1880. He was the eleventh of thirteen children of an upper-middle-class family. His father,...

Lytton Strachey, critic and biographer, created a new kind of biography. His studies of Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria, powerful and dramatic, though relatively conventional, are excellent biographies, but his Eminent Victorians, published in 1918,...

Lytton Strachey and the Search for Modern Sexual Identity: The Last Eminent Victorian by Julie Anne Taddeo Harrington. 192 pages, $19.95 (paper) VIRGINIA and Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, E. M. Forster, Dora...

Like the Americans but unlike, say, the French, the British are acknowledged masters of the biographical genre. So much so that a handful of the century's cultural luminaries, from Einstein to Coward, from Alfred Hitchcock to Michel Foucault, now have as many biographies to...

UNCOMMON ARRANGEMENTS: SEVEN PORTRAITS OF MARRIED LIFE IN LONDON LITERARY CIRCLES, 1910–1939By Katie Roiphe The Dial Press, $26, 344 pages Within a certain social circle—O.K., mine—mention of the name Katie Roiphe inspires exasperated eye rolls, forehead slaps, even hisses. Ms. Roiphe is the author,...

At an appropriately sophisticated hour on a recent Tuesday evening, 29-year-old Cody Franchetti relaxed at his table at the four-star restaurant Le Bernardin, explaining what it means to be an Italian aristocrat in 21st-century New York. In honor of the occasion, but mostly because the...