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In a 1973 essay in The New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Hardwick lamented the overexposure of its most prominent members — the “exhaustion” of Virginia Woolf and “the draining” of the writer Lytton Strachey.

Nino Strachey, a curator and cultural historian, is descended from an illustrious family of intellectuals, civil servants and politicians who trace roots back to the 1600s.

Another was Oliver Strachey, a British cryptologist who ran a code-breaking unit in Canada that tracked spies, just as Elizebeth’s team did.

Strachey first appeared in the 1981 novel “Death Trick,” which explored dark strains in gay culture and brought a new sensibility to hard-boiled crime fiction.

His inspirations include the British biographer Lytton Strachey, whom Bailey said regarded humanity as “ridiculous, but also touching.”