Max Beerbohm

"Called by Virginia Woolf "the prince" of essayists and praised by F. W. Dupee for a "whim of iron, cleverness amounting to genius," Max Beerbohm himself noted that "only the insane take themselves quite seriously." Nonetheless, from his precocious debut as a dandy in 1890s Oxford, until after World War II, when he put the pen aside, Beerbohm was recognized as an incomparable observer of modern life and an essayist whose voice was always and only...