Dealing with biographer Lytton Strachey's early years, Michael Holroyd describes his family as typical of the British upper class. The boy was always rather sickly, and this had an effect on his education. Instead of following the normal educational pattern of the British public school, Lytton was sent first to a school for girls and then to a supposedly advanced educational laboratory. Eventually he went to Cambridge where he came into contact with an elite group including E. M. Forster, Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, and Leonard Woolfe. There he cultivated his taste for literature and an exotic life style. The volume ends as he begins to write reviews and articles for literary periodicals.
The review of this Book prepared by Jack Goodstein