Books: Headmaster

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE—Lytton Strachey—Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

Lytton Strachey, who started a new school of biography, is still headmaster of it. Learned dilettante of history, he is no ghoulish exhumer of dead facts but a mildly malicious wizard who summons very lifelike ghosts. Says he: "The virtues of a metaphysician are the vices of a historian. A generalized, colorless, unimaginative view of things is admirable when one is considering the law of causality, but one needs something else if one has to describe Queen Elizabeth." That Something Else, as every Stracheyite knows, Strachey...

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