Strachey, a member of the Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals, depicted Gordon as a ludicrous figure, a bad-tempered, deranged egomaniac with a nasty habit of knocking out Arabs whenever he was unhappy, and who led himself into disaster. Even more devastatingly, Strachey depicted Gordon as a monumental hypocrite, noting the contrast between Gordon's lofty Christian ideas of love, compassion, charity, grace and hope vs. a career full of hate, war, carnage, death and destruction. Strachey ended his essay on Gordon on a cynical note: "At any rate, it all ended very happily-in a glorious slaughter of twenty thousand Arabs, a vast addition to the British Empire and a step in the Peerage for Sir Evelyn Baring".