Daily Inspiration Quote by Lytton Strachey

A neat little booby trap of a sentence: Strachey takes the old proverb "Discretion is the better part of valor" and swaps in "biography" to expose how cowardice often dresses up as good manners in historical writing. The intent is polemical. He is warning biographers that tact, loyalty to reputation, and the urge to smooth a life into a respectable arc are not virtues in the one genre that claims to tell the truth about people.

The subtext is a refusal of the Victorian "great man" shrine. When discretion rules, biography becomes embalming: facts are curated, motives are sanitized, scandal is omitted not because it is irrelevant but because it is inconvenient. Strachey is arguing that the omissions are the story. What a culture chooses not to say about its heroes reveals its real moral anxieties - sex, ambition, hypocrisy, cruelty - the human material that makes public virtue possible.

Context matters: Strachey, a leading Bloomsbury critic, published Eminent Victorians in 1918, after a war that shattered faith in official narratives and pious institutions. His method was to puncture grandeur with precision, irony, and psychologically sharp detail. So the line doubles as a manifesto for modern biography: less marble statue, more X-ray. It also flatters the reader into complicity, inviting us to prefer candor over ceremony, not out of gossip-mongering but because power deserves scrutiny. If biography is going to matter, Strachey implies, it has to risk offense. Otherwise it's just public relations with footnotes.