LYTTON STRACHEY, a biography by MICHAEL HOLROYD

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Lytton Strachey is best known for being one of Florence Nightingale’s ‘Eminent Victorians’ though as she freely admitted, merely because of his unusual height and forcefully phallic beard (hence the sobriquet eminent as in eminence as in mountainous).

Lord Lytton as he became known after knighting himself in a private ceremony on the downland above his dog kennels near Hungerford in Wiltshire, started to write saucy romances in the early 1900’s but gave up because of an ear infection Luggyitus which impaired his vision. He took up painting but found the tedium of endless coats & varnish on his trousers annoying. For a while, he utilised his height (8feet 7inches in pale lemon socks) by joining a roving basketball team the Wiltshire Wykemasts, but his aptitude for ball games never developed, particularly after being struck on the head several times by soot bags tossed from an impatient crowd. Disorientated and claiming descent from Maid Marion he spent several years as an itinerant puppeteer & cross-dresser, crisscrossing Salisbury Plain in ever more desperate attempts to “find himself”. He was arrested for debt in 1911 and incarcerated in an institution for deaf effeminates at Milford Haven. He escaped, but fell down a mineshaft after pursuit by hounds. He was buried at Compton Bassett, leaving his puppets to the Dorchester Museum where they can still be seen enacting the ‘Battle of the Bulge’ for American tourists.