Word: beerbohm
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...literary precursor of the novel was the tale, originally an oral narrative. In the hands of such latter-day practitioners as Oscar Wilde and Max Beerbohm, the tale became a highly sophisticated means of telling a story that would not be believable if told in any other tone of voice. In The Seven Islands, Novelist Jon (The House by the Sea) Godden makes the unbelievable believable by spinning with quiet skill a stately little tale about India and hanging from its frail threads the weight of an ancient way of life...
Died. Sir Max Beerbohm, 83, dumpling-shaped British wit, drama critic (The Saturday Review), caricaturist and satirist (Zuleika Dobson), last of the Victorian elegants; in Rapallo, Italy. One of literature's most modest, sparing and delicate talents, "the incomparable Max," as Shaw called him, belonged to an age of posturing geniuses and aesthetes (Burne-Jones, the Rossettis, Swinburne, Whistler, Oscar Wilde), was one of them but not one with them. With a few deft strokes of his caricaturist's drawing pen, he could put the lucubrations of a giant into gnat's perspective and keep the world...
...calls a "Third Force" between French colonialism and military Communism, is personified in Alden Pyle, member of a U.S. economic mission. He is the "quiet American"-a Harvard man, young, innocent, good, humorless, a Unitarian. He speaks in the hortatory Emily Post style which all British novelists since Max Beerbohm seem to think is the native speech of proper Bostonians. He eats "Vit-Health" sandwich-spread that his mother sends him. He is courageous and dedicated, but his eager virtue turns into fumbling crime. His idealistic dabbling in Indo-Chinese politics-he furnishes a plastic bomb to a local faction...
...Graydon Upton '31 contributed a great deal of consistently fine and funny light verse. Carl E. Pickhardt's '31 caricatures of famous professors of that era--Barret Wendell, Charles T. Copeland, Irving Babbit, George Santayana, and G. L. Kittredge--are excellent drawings in the style of Sir Max Beerbohm. Part of the verse that accompanies the caricature of Kittredge follows...
Toynbee ridicules the smugness of the 18th and 19th centuries in terms of a Max Beerbohm cartoon (see cut). The Enlightened Dandy is so taken with his perfection that he can conceive of the future only as a gawkier version of himself; the Victorian Bourgeois is so optimistic that he sees the future as a figure fairly bursting with progress. But Toynbee believes that the 20th century's thin, frightened young man who sees only a question mark in the future ("Is he perhaps wondering whether he can even look forward to having any successor of any kind...