Lytton Strachey’s first great success, and his most famous achievement, was “Eminent Victorians” (1918), a collection of four short biographies of Victorian heroes. With a dry wit, he exposed the human failings of his subjects and what he saw as the hypocrisy at the centre of Victorian morality. This work was followed in the same style by “Queen Victoria” (1921).

On 9 March 2013, the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College host a workshop to mark the centenary of the publication of Leonard Woolf's path-breaking first novel, set in then Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, The Village in the Jungle. Woolf's novel (the first of only two) is a leading yet often overlooked modernist document and is increasingly recognized as an extraordinarily far-sighted colonial text, an oblique record of his years as a colonial officer in Ceylon (1904-11). It has also bec ...