The "sensitive recluse of legend" had a wide currency, appearing, for instance, in Lytton Strachey's description, in his famously debunking set of portraits "Eminent Victorians," as Newman's "soft, spectacled, Oxford manner, with its half-effeminate diffidence". Geoffrey Faber, whose own account of Newman in "Oxford Apostles" was far from hagiographic, found Strachey's portrait a distasteful caricature, bearing scant likeness to the Newman of history and designed solely "to tickle the self-conceit of a cynical and beliefless generation". In Strachey's account, however, the true villain is Cardinal Manning, who is accused of secretly briefing the Press with the false story that Newman would turn down the Cardinalate, and who privately said of his late "friend": "Poor Newman! He was a great hater!".