skopia
Theobald Pontifex beats piety into his son with perfect Christian conviction, and Ernest spends the novel working free of him. Butler handed the revolt against Victorian respectability its sharpest and funniest weapon.
Bread and circuses came from here, and so did the line about guarding the guards. Juvenal turns sixteen poems of fury on imperial Rome, where an honest man cannot afford to live.
Four Victorian idols go under Strachey's scalpel: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, the headmaster Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon at Khartoum. The malice is so elegant that English biography never went back to reverence.
Found as a baby in a squire's bed, Tom grows up generous and reckless, loses his home, and follows Sophia Western to London. Coleridge ranked the plot beside that of Oedipus.