One of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, Toby Litt, author of Corpsing, deadkidsongs, Exhibitionism, Finding Myself and Ghost Story brings us a monthly selection on cult literature.

This month features: Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey
Published by: Penguin
ISBN: 0140183507
Price: £7.99

It would be an exaggeration, but only a slight one, to say that all contemporary non-fiction starts with Eminent Victorians.

In the book's preface, Strachey writes what amounts to a manifesto. There is, he argues, too much of everything - too much, most of all, of information. '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...'

This situation has, since, only become more extreme. Try, for example, to imagine a written history of the Internet. (I'm sure there are several.) How would it be possible? How would it mimic or replace ignorance?

Strachey provided the answer. History, from now on, must be written 'not by the direct method of scrupulous narration'. The historian must take a different approach. 'He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.'

In other words, history must be personal, anecdotal, colourful and, most of all, must abandon the ideal of being total. It must aspire to 'a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant'.

The most frequent objection put to Strachey's method, if method isn't too heavy a word, is that it turns history into gossip - a higher form of gossip, but gossip nevertheless.

Everyone knows that the best gossip is bitchy. And Strachey's one-line pen-portraits are delectable:

'[Hurrell Froude] was obsessed by the ideals of saintliness, and convinced of the supreme importance of not eating too much.'

'poor Doctor Hall, a rough terrier of a man, who had worried his way to the top of his profession'.

Neither was Strachey averse to a bit of baroque camp:

'Let us borrow for a moment the wings of Historic Imagination, and, hovering lightly over the Oxford of the thirties, take a rapid bird's-eye view.'

Strachey's predecessors were, of course, Victorians: in his paradoxes, there are tinges of Oscar Wilde, in his aesthetic, of Walter Pater. His followers, on the other hand, range from Albert Goldman and Kitty Kelly to Bruce Chatwin (particularly in The Viceroy of Ouidah), Simon Schama and all TV historians.

Lytton Strachey is about as far from a rigid, structural, post-Marxist interpretation of history as he could be. Nowhere, in Eminent Victorians, will one find an argument supported by statistics, or an event explicable by anything other than 'the mysterous and relentless powers of circumstance and character'.

The four eponymous Victorians are Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Gordon - or, as Strachey puts it, 'an ecclesiastic, an educational authority, a woman of action, and a man of adventure'.

With Cardinal Manning, Strachey manages to give the theological machinations of the Anglican church some of the blasphemous glamour of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. He does this partly by writing Manning's biography is parallel with that of Cardinal Newman, a more sympathetic, less time-serving convert to Roman Catholicism.

Florence Nightingale, it is hard not to believe, was later reincarnated as Margaret Thatcher: 'Once, when she had given some direction, a doctor ventured to remark that the thing could not be done. "But it must be done," said Miss Nightingale.' Strachey takes away her lamp and gives her instead a spine.

Dr Thomas Arnold, Headmaster of Rugby School, was a man who, 'By introducing morals and religion into his scheme of education, ... altered the whole atmosphere of public school life.'

Last of all, there is General Gordon, whose extraordinary career of slaughter and contemplation both parallels and contradicts those of Arthur Rimbaud and T.E.Lawrence.

Strachey's book is subtle in many ways, but none more than structure. Although each essay could be read independently, characters flit from one to the next - the poet Arthur Clough, the Rev. Mr Bowdler, Prime Minister Gladstone and, of course, Queen Victoria herself. And the four eminences, though hugely varied in character and fate, begin slowly to reveal their similarities: all were deeply pious, all worked ceaselessly, all believed that their work was for the public good - and for the good of the public's individual souls.

It is the fact of this assumption, of the existence of a Christian God, and therefore of their own involvement with the next world as well as this, that Strachey knows separates his age from the one he is anatomizing. Of Arthur Clough and another man he says, they 'went through an experience which was more distressing in those days that it has since become: they lost their faith'.

This, in the end, is what enabled Strachey to write the history of the Victorian Age. And although he himself writes sceptically, he is well aware of the attractions of the opposite view. 'It is not because he satisfies the reason, but because he astounds it, that men abase themselves before the Vicar of Christ'.

As Strachey writes, in another context, but surely not unconscious of its wider implication: 'Alike in their emphasis and their lack of emphasis, in their eccentricity and their conventionality, in their matter-of-factness and their romance, these four figures seem to embody the mingling contradictions of the English spirit.'