A founding member of the Bloomsbury Group and author of Eminent Victorians, he established a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit.

[4] Lady Strachey was an enthusiast for languages and literature, making her children perform their own plays and write verse from an early age.

This was a small school with a wide range of after-class activities, where Strachey's acting skills exceeded those of other pupils; he was particularly convincing when portraying female parts.

[6] Lady Strachey decided in 1893 that her son should start his more serious education and sent him to Abbotsholme School in Rocester, Derbyshire, where pupils were required to do manual work every day.

There Strachey befriended the professor of modern literature, Walter Raleigh, who, besides being his favourite teacher, also became the most influential figure in his life before he went up to Cambridge.

Moore's philosophy, with its assumption that the summum bonum lies in achieving a high quality of humanity, in experiencing delectable states of mind, and in intensifying experience by contemplating great works of art, was a particularly important influence.

Even though the letters of recommendation written for him by those under whom he had studied showed that he was held in high esteem at Cambridge, he failed to get the appointment and decided to try for a fellowship at Trinity College.

[2] From 1903 through 1905 he wrote a 400-page dissertation on Warren Hastings, the 18th-century Indian imperialist, but the work failed to secure Strachey the fellowship and led to his return to London.

[2] But, as he was about to turn 30, family life started irritating him, and he took to travelling into the country more often, supporting himself by writing reviews and critical articles for The Spectator and other periodicals.

[18]In 1911 H. A. L. Fisher, a former President of the British Academy and the Board of Education, was in search of someone to write a short one-volume survey of French literature.

Despite almost a full column of praise in The Times Literary Supplement of 1 February and sales that by April 1914 had reached nearly 12,000 copies in the British Empire and America, the book brought Strachey neither the fame he craved nor the money he badly needed.

Each provided him with £100, which, together with his earnings from the Edinburgh Review and other periodicals, made it possible for him to rent a small thatched cottage, The Lacket, outside the village of Lockeridge, near Marlborough, Wiltshire.

In the late autumn of 1917, however, his brother Oliver and his friends Harry Norton, John Maynard Keynes, and Saxon Sydney-Turner agreed to pay the rent on the Mill House at Tidmarsh, near Pangbourne, Berkshire.

During the First World War, Strachey applied for recognition as a conscientious objector, but in the event, he was granted exemption from military service on health grounds.

Unlike any biography of its time, Eminent Victorians examines the career and psychology of historical figures by using literary devices such as paradox, antithesis, hyperbole, and irony.

Strachey was mainly interested sexually in Partridge, as well as in various other young men,[25] including a secret sadomasochistic relationship with Roger Senhouse, later the head of the publishing house Secker & Warburg.

In Lewis's novel The Apes of God he is seen in the character of Matthew Plunkett, whom Holroyd describes as "a maliciously distorted and hilarious caricature of Lytton".

[30] Strachey was portrayed by Nigel Planer as Lytton Scratchy in Gloomsbury, by Sue Limb, a parody of the Bloomsbury Group, 5 series, 2012-2018 on BBC Radio 4.

Strachey was portrayed by Simon Russell Beale in the 2020 BBC Radio 3 play Elizabeth and Essex by Robin Brooks.