Lytton Strachey

Strachey's Eminent Victorians, published in 1918 as the First World War ended, punctured four national heroes, Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Gordon, in short, ironic portraits instead of the reverent two-volume lives the Victorians wrote. He selected quotations wickedly and was often unfair, and later scholars have corrected him, especially on Nightingale. But he changed the form for good: biography could be brief, shaped and sceptical. Read it for its style and then ask, as he would want, what he left out.