When Lytton Strachey looked back at the 'apotheosis' of Queen Victoria's final years in his biography of 1921, he could only wonder at the disparity between the 'dazzled imagination of her subjects' and the unimaginative woman who had somehow inspired them. While 'Victoria soared aloft towards the regions of divinity through a nimbus of purest glory,' as Strachey put it, no one appeared to realise how inadequate she was to her symbolic task:

LRB 1 August 1996 | PDF Download