While working on his two-volume biography of Lytton Strachey, Michael Holroyd had access to the Strachey archives. From the same source he collected all Strachey's diaries and memoirs, which together in this volume form an intermittent but not disconnected autobiography.

From childhood diaries to the introspective and often anguished records of late adolescence emerges an intimate self-portrait, valuable for its own sake and also for the light it sheds on the most gifted members of the Bloomsbury Group. In addition to the informal diaries, Strachey wrote and read to the Memoir Club two autobiographical essays (also published here) which may be judged among the finest and most characteristic of his writing.