Max Beerbohm – författare

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time''Zuleika Dobson is a highly accomplished and superbly written book whose spirit is farcical,'' said E. M. Forster. ''It is a great work--the most consistent achievement of fantasy in our time . . . so funny and charming, so iridescent yet so profound.''Originally published in 1911, Max Beerbohm''s sparklingly wicked satire concerns the unlikely events that occur when a femme fatale briefly enters the supremely privileged, all-male domain of Judas College, Oxford. A conjurer by profession, Zuleika Dobson can only love a man who is impervious to her considerable charms: a circumstance that proves fatal, as any number of love-smitten suitors are driven to suicide by the damsel''s rejection. Laced with memorable one-liners (''Death cancels all engagements,'' utters the first casualty) and inspired throughout by Beerbohm''s rococo imagination, this lyrical evocation of Edwardian undergraduate life at Oxford has, according to Forster, ''a beauty unattainable by serious literature.''''I read Zuleika Dobson with pleasure,'' recalled Bertrand Russell. ''It represents the Oxford that the two World Wars have destroyed with a charm that is not likely to be reproduced anywhere in the world for the next thousand years.''

Max Beerbohm's erudite wit and playful conceits represent the pinnacle of the Aesthetic period's capacity to laugh at itself whilst celebrating itself. This book was the author's first, and was presented by him (with tongue lodged firmly in cheek) as a 'collected works', an august memorial to a brilliant career.Included are all seven of his major early essays: Dandies and Dandies on the important distinction between true Regency foppery and its cruder modern notion; A Good Prince portraying the future Edward VIII as an already demanding baby monarch; 1880 and its very recent but already intriguingly faded charms; King George the Fourth rigorously reappraising the Regent; The Pervasion of Rouge celebrating the return of artifice after far too long a naturalcy; Poor Romeo! imagining the story behind a laughing-stock of the Regency stage; and Diminuendo charting the author's own course, firstly to disillusion, and then to retirement in outmoded greatness at the age of 23!Though these essays were justly acclaimed in their time, their magnificence is such that they also demand the highest accolades in ours, replete as they are with undiminished colour and spectacle, humour and barbed excellence.MAX BEERBOHM was born in 1872. He attended Merton College in Oxford, but left without completing his degree. He was a regular contributor to magazines (where these essays originally appeared) and a caricaturist of world renown. He married Florence Kahn in 1910. They moved to Rapallo in Italy and stayed there, apart from the period of the two world wars, for the rest of their lives. Knighted in 1939, Sir Max died in 1956.

Max Beerbohm presents in More a collection of twenty brilliantly amusing essays. In a wide-ranging tour through both the inspiring and the ridiculous in English fin de siecle society, Beerbohm casts a veiled critical drubbing here, and a wistful though sprightly appreciation there, thoroughly entertaining us and accurately spearing his victims.Some of his most noted work appeared in this second little volume when it was first published in 1899. In "Punch" he asks us if the magazine's terrible dullness is not our own fault; in An Infamous Brigade the question is revolved as to whether the fire engine is not an infernal machine designed to dampen our pleasure; in The Blight on the Music Halls we must critically consider the relative merits of vulgarity and refinement; in Ouida the famed enthusiastic author's wild colour and occasional infelicities are justly celebrated; in Arise, Sir - -! the decorations offered to literary time-servers are the saucy target; in A Cloud of Pinafores the cult of childlike simplicity tempts the author's tongue, and sharpens its point...With razor-edged wit and a perfect ear for irony, Max Beerbohm delivers us in More twenty further reasons to call him the finest, and funniest, essayist of his era.