Sir Max Beerbohm

Facsimilie of colour illustrated 1918 ed. of The Happy Hypocrite.

Broadcasts on various subjects, mostly to do with life in England in the decades around the Great War.

That old bell, presage of a train, had just sounded through Oxford station; and the undergraduates who were waiting there, gay figures in tweed or flannel, moved to the margin of the platform and gazed idly up the line. Young and careless, in the glow of the afternoon sunshine, they struck a sharp note of incongruity with the worn boards they stood on, with the fading signals and grey eternal walls of that antique station, which, familiar to them and insignificant, does yet whisper to the tourist the last enchantments of the Middle Age.

Cyrano, a master swordsman and poet, feels he can not woo his beloved Roxane due to an unfortunate physical flaw: his grotesquely large nose. Resigning himself to helping another suitor, the dashing yet tongue-tied Christian, Cyrano uses his mastery of words to win Roxane for him. But when Roxane finds that she has fallen for Christian's mind - and not for his beauty - which of her two suitors will finally possess her heart?"

"In Seven Men the English caricaturist and critic Max Beerbohm turns his comic searchlight upon the fantastic fin de siecle world of the 1890s - the age of Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and the young Yeats, as well as of Beerbohm's own first success. In a series of luminous prose sketches, Beerbohm captures the likes of Enoch Soames, only begetter of the neglected poetic masterwork Fungoids; Maltby and Braxton, two fashionable novelists caught in a bitter rivalry; and "Savonarola" Brown, author of a truly incredible tragedy encompassing the entire Italian Renaissance. An ingenious and enduring work of humorous writing, Seven Men is also a shrewdly perceptive, heartfelt homage to the eccentric character of a bygone age."--BOOK JACKET.

Beerbohm's delightful caricatures of the Pre-Raphaelites.