Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. HTMLDownload Description
"I offer here some of the essays that I have written in the course of the past ten years. While I was collecting them and (quite patiently) reading them again, I found that a few of them were in direct reference to the moments at which they were severally composed. It was clear that these must have their dates affixed to them. And for sake of uniformity I have dated all the others, and, doing so, have thought I need not exclude all such topical remarks as in them too were uttered, nor throw into a past tense such of those remarks as I have retained." ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. HTMLDownload Description
If I were `seeing over' a house, and found in every room an iron cage let into the wall, and were told by the caretaker that these cages were for me to keep lions in, I think I should open my eyes rather wide. Yet nothing seems to me more natural than a fire in the grate. oubtless, when I began to walk, one of my first excursions was to the fender, that I might gaze more nearly at the live thing roaring and raging behind it; and I dare say I dimly wondered by what blessed dispensation this creature was allowed in a domain so peaceful as my nursery. I do not think I ever needed to be warned against scaling the fender. I knew by instinct that the creature within it was dangerous - fiercer still than the cat which had once strayed into the room and scratched me for my advances. As I grew older, I ceased to wonder at the creature's presence and learned to call it `the fire,' quite lightly. There are so many queer things in the world that we have no time to go on wondering at the queerness of the things we see habitually. It is not that these things are in themselves less queer than they at first seemed to us. It is that our vision of them has been dimmed. ... Read more

Book Description
Max Beerbohm was widely celebrated as the wittiest mind of his age. And it was a very long age indeed: he became famous in the mid-1890s and remained so until his death in 1956. His wit manifested itself in both prose and caricature, and his writings and drawings are keenly interesting. Max's life, however, was relatively uneventful, and of interest, he said, only to himself. This biography of Beerbohm, the first in forty years, enlivens his story by quoting him whenever possible, and the result-thanks to Max himself-is a scintillating and entertaining book.

John Hall moves quickly through Max's history: schoolboy; college undergraduate; London caricaturist, journalist, and critic; Edwardian social butterfly; married man and self-exile to Italy in 1910, where he produced numerous books, essays, and caricatures; and, from 1935 to 1956, occasional BBC radio broadcaster. Hall notes that although all Max's work during his fifteen early years on the London scene concerned contemporary art and life, after his "retirement" in 1910 his writings and drawings harkened back to the late-Victorian/Edwardian era and even to the Pre-Raphaelites; he became, he said, an "interesting link with the past."

This book, like Beerbohm's work, highlights his connection with various eminences over three eras: Algernon Swinburne, J.A.M. Whistler, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, and many others. Written in an idiosyncratic, opinionated, lively, quirky style, it is just the kind of biography of which Max might have (for the most part) approved. ... Read more

Book Description
This delightful book is an anthology of Beerbohm`s best images, accompanied by historical and analytical commentary by N. John Hall that is enriched by liberal quotation from Beerbohm`s own witty essays, criticism, letters, and fiction. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

An analytic look at Beerbohm
An exploration of Beerbohm, that puzzling writer, and the Dante he has become.
An interesting exploration of the dandy concept as personified by Beerbohm. Read this to understand how Beerbohm "concealed in his works of prose fantasy, elaborate and profound allegories of the state of man's soul during the palmy days of the bristish empire"

An interesting peek into Beerbohm, "the dandy, talker, caricaturist parodist, esayist and dramatic critic". Read to find more! ... Read more

Book Description
Studies the humor of Max Beerbohm, his life and writings. ILLUS. ... Read more