It is not the historian'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.

Discretion is not the better part of biography.

Lytton Strachey

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

Lytton Strachey