Part 1 of Essay
, English biographer, was born in 1880. He was an openly gay member of the artistically talented Bloomsbury Group, centering on Leonard and Virginia Woolf. (Strachey had once proposed to Virginia née Stephen, but she laughed. When he was conscripted in World War I, he declared himself to be a pacifist. When the board asked ....

Part 2 of Essay
.... General Charles "Chinese" Gordon revolutionized English biography. Until Strachey, biographers had kept awestruck distance from their subjects; anything short of adulation was regarded as disrespect Strachey, however, announced that he would write lives with "a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant," whether flattering to the subject or not. His intensely personal sketches scandalized stuffier readers but delighted many literati. Strachey's impressionistic portraits ....