Max Beerbohm
Max Beerbohm
Sir Henry Maximilian "Max" Beerbohmwas an English essayist, parodist, and caricaturist. He first became known in the 1890s as a dandy and a humorist. He was the drama critic for the Saturday Review from 1898 until 1910, when he relocated to Rapallo, Italy. In his later years he was popular for his occasional radio broadcasts. Among his best-known works is his only novel, Zuleika Dobson, published in 1911. His caricatures, drawn usually in pen or pencil with muted watercolour tinting,...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionActor
Date of Birth24 August 1872
You will think me lamentably crude: my experience of life has been drawn from life itself
He cannot see beyond his own nose. Even the fingers he outstretches from it to the world are (as I shall suggest) often invisible to him.
A swear-word in a rustic slum / A simple swear-word is to some, / To Masefield something more.
O the disgrace of it! - / The scandal, the incredible come-down!
It is doubtful whether the people of southern England have even yet realized how much introspection there is going on all the time in the Five Towns.
. . . but beauty and the lust for learning have yet to be allied.
To give and then not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving.
To destroy is still the strongest instinct in nature.
Only the insane take themselves seriously.
It distresses me, this failure to keep pace with the leaders of thought, as they pass into oblivion.
Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs.
Have you noticed ... there is never any third act in a nightmare? They bring you to a climax of terror and then leave you there. They are the work of poor dramatists.
I am a Tory anarchist. I should like everyone to go about doing just as he pleased - short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed.
A quiet city is a contradiction in terms. It is a thing uncanny, spectral.