Buggers in love with womanisers

Strachey and Virginia Woolf


Portrait by Nicolas Clerihew Bentley


Strachey and Ralph Partridge

When Lytton Strachey was asked by the tribunal challenging his "conciencious objection" during the First World War: "What would you do if a German soldier were raping your sister?"

"I should attempt to come between them." was his camp response.

A very strange man, Mr Strachey.

Intellectual, historical biographer and author, pacifist and member of the Bloomsbury Set, he not only had a passion for John Maynard Keynes (cerebrally and physically) and Duncan Grant, he inveigled his friend Dora Carrington into marrying his occasional lover, the ostensibly heterosexual Ralph Partridge in order to maintain a secret veneer of respectability.

And, as his recently-published letters revealed, he was also quite a kinky brain-box, with a penchant for spanking...

“A writer’s promise is like a tiger’s smile”

"Discretion is not the better part of biography."

"Ladies in love with buggers, and buggers in love with womanisers, and the price of coal going up too. Where will it all end?"

Giles Lytton Strachey (1st March 1880 – 21st January 1932)