[His reply to the chairman's other stock question, which had previously never failed to embarrass the claimant: "Tell me, Mr. Strachey, what would yo… - Lytton Strachey

It is not [the biographer's] business to be complimentary; it is his business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them...dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior motives.

... Voltaire ...
The great potentate of the eighteenth century has suffered cruelly indeed at the hands of posterity. Everyone, it is true, has heard of him; but who has read him? It is by his name that ye shall know him, and not by his works. With the exception of his letters, of Candide, of , and a few other of his shorter pieces, the vast mass of his productions has been already consigned to oblivion.

The art of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England. … With us, the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegated to the journeymen of letters; we do not reflect that it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one.