Word: stracheys
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Since Lytton Strachey published his Queen Victoria 15 years ago, that classic portrait of a just and virtuous monarch, first Empress of India, devoted wife and inconsolable widow, has scarcely been challenged by biographers. Readers might feel that Strachey had not told them all that was to be said about Victoria, but they were likely to be convinced, upon finishing his book, that he had told them about all they wanted to hear. In the shadow of that disadvantage Edith Sitwell last week offered a balanced, well-rounded-study of the Queen that included little new information about her, much...
...Sitwell's sympathy for the sufferings and struggles of the poor. Together with the artful sketches of the celebrities around the Queen, chapters illuminating the social background form the chief distinction of Victoria of England, throwing light on a side of the sovereign's career that Lytton Strachey neglected...
...been quite hardheaded. "Queen Victoria," he revealed, "commanded that her dead husband's clothing be laid out afresh every evening, also water in his basin, and this astonishing rite was performed with scrupulous regularity for nearly 40 years. . . . [There was also] Disraeli, twice premier of England, whom Lytton Strachey describes as 'a vainglorious creature racked by gout and asthma, dyed and corseted with a curl on his miserable old forehead kept in its place all night by a bandana handkerchief!' . . . Kant, while living in Holland, lived in 13 different places and changed his abode 24 times; Voltaire...
Translations are tricky and most poets, at least, would say that poetry is untranslatable. Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), whom the late Lytton Strachey called "the Swift of poetry," and who is still the most widely read poet in France, was a well-to-do bourgeois who despised his class, lived most of his life with a mulatto mistress, took opium and scandalized even Paris with his Fleurs du Mal, which combined polish, putrescence and pornography to an inspired degree. Since his death he has been manhandled by many a translator. Last week the latest attempt to transplant his hot-house...
...taken in any company of ordinary students of literature would reveal that the group was more or less acquainted with the comedies: e.g., "The Alchemist", "Volpone", "Every Man in his Humour", but only the ambitious souls who sit up all night with the heroines of Voltaire, to use Lytton Strachey's phrase, would confess to having read "Sejanus" or "Catiline...