The publication of this book is a major event in the history of biography and a boon to every practicing biographer. Lytton Strachey is usually hailed as the progenitor of modern biography. But that honor belongs to J.A. Froude (1818-94). Not only did he break biography out of the insufferable bonds of Victorian reticence, he brought a narrative power to the genre that surpasses even that of what is generally regarded as the greatest biography in the English language: Boswell’s “Life of Johnson.”