LETTER : Quintessential 20th-century artist

From Mr Michael Holroyd

Sir: David Lister describes Carrington, the film that Christopher Hampton adapted from my biography of Lytton Strachey, as being "little known". He gives this obscurity as the reason for Emma Thompson having sought extra publicity for the film at the Cannes festival. ("Mme Thompson: elle a du style", 24 May).

Apparently, she had little success with David Lister. He calls Carrington a "Victorian artist" who "fell in love with a homosexual man".

Carrington went to the Slade School of Fine Art in 1910, met Lytton Strachey, that arch-detractor of Victorian values, in 1915, and died in 1932. As the exhibition of her work at the Barbican Gallery this autumn will show, she was quintessentially a 20th-century artist.

Yours faithfully,

MICHAEL HOLROYD

London, W10

24 May