Four Generations

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Edward Bulwer Lytton was an Victorian politician, occultist and writer, famous for starting a novel with the words "it was a dark and stormy night". His best known book is the Last Days of Pompeii. He also wrote "The Haunted and the Haunters"- one of the best English ghost stories.

His son Robert Bulwer Lytton wrote poetry under the pen-name Owen Meredith. As viceroy of India in the late 1870s he presided over a famine which killed millions. His laissez-faire attitude to the suffering of his "subjects" has been described as "genocidal".

Robert's daughter Emily married Edwin Lutyens, the architect of New Delhi. She was a theosophist and acted as foster-mother to the theosophical "World Teacher" Jiddu Khrishnamurti.

Emily's daughter Mary Lutyens was Khrishnamurti's disciple and biographer. She also wrote The Lyttons in India- a book about her grandfather the viceroy.