Giles Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) was a British writer and critic. He is best known for establishing a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit. From time to time throughout his life Strachey studied Italian, German, and French. Landmarks in French Literature was published in 1912. By 1916 Strachey's theory of biography was fully developed and mature. He was being greatly influenced by Dostoevsky. His first great success, and his most famous achievement, was Eminent Victorians (1918), a collection of four short biographies of Victorian heroes. This work was followed in the same style by Queen Victoria (1921). Amongst his other works are Books and Characters: French and English (1922), Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History (1928), Portraits in Miniature (1931) and Characters and Commentaries (1933).

"Eminent Victorians" marked an epoch in the art of biography; it also helped to crack the old myths of high Victorianism and to usher in a new spirit by which chauvinism, hypocrisy and the stiff upper lip were debunked. In it, Strachey cleverly exposes the self-seeking ambitions of Cardinal Manning and the manipulative, neurotic Florence Nightingale; and in his essays on Dr Arnold and General Gordon, his quarries are not only his subjects but also the public-school system and the whole structure of nineteenth-century liberal values.