ABSTRACT
At the end of September 1904, after spending several months away from Cambridge working on his fellowship dissertation on Warren Hastings, 'Lytton Strachey returned once more to Trinity', Michael Holroyd explains. Strachey made his reputation writing about the Victorians, and then turned his attention to the Elizabethan age. And yet, from at least late adolescence until the end of his life, he clearly felt more at home in the eighteenth century; he wrote dozens of essays and brief portraits on eighteenth-century figures. Strachey's passion for what he calls in his late portrait of Edward Gibbon 'the sweet reasonableness of the eighteenth century' intersects for a brief moment with the question of the value of modern university education. If Strachey thought that Paul Johnson was a writer whose 'entire point of view is out of date', he also thought that his 'brilliant sentences seem to come to one, out of the Past, with the friendliness of a conversation'.
