English writer Lytton Strachey was BOTD in 1880. Born in London to a military family with aristocratic connections, he was a delicate, mother-obsessed child who enjoyed dressing as a woman in school theatricals. Educated at the University of Liverpool, he transferred to Cambridge University, where he met Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes and Bertrand Russell. A notorious homosexual, his lovers included his cousin Duncan Grant, and Thoby Stephen, through which he met Thoby’s sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. After university, he returned to London, writing reviews and articles for The Spectator, travelling to health spas and growing an enormous badger beard. He became a founding member of the Bloomsbury Group, warming to Virginia so much that he once proposed marriage. (Perhaps wisely, she refused him). He published his first book, Eminent Victorians, in 1916, a collection of satirical biographies of beloved Victorians including Florence Nightingale and Gordon of Khartoum. Combining Freudian psychology with irreverence and wit, the book made him a literary celebrity, kick-starting a fashion for critical reassessment of Victorian values. He registered as a conscientious objector in World War One: when asked what he would do if a German soldier tried to rape his sister, he replied “I’d throw myself between them.” Eventually exempted from military service, he published an unflattering but much admired biography of Queen Victoria in 1921. He moved to Ham Spray House in Wiltshire in 1924, living in a platonic relationship with the painter Dora Carrington, occasionally sharing a bed with her husband Ralph Partridge and collecting a coterie of young male lovers. He died in 1932 aged 51, reportedly quipping “If this is dying, then I don’t think much of it”. He was portrayed by Jonathan Pryce in the 1995 biopic Carrington.