Word: beerbohm
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...name-dropping makes a successful column. "Would you [like me to] tell you about a dinner party for my Uncle Max? . . . Nah, you really don't want to hear about that . . . The basic fact of newspaper life is that if any Uncle Max-unless it's Beerbohm, Beaverbrook or Factor-breaks a leg, it never makes the news columns . . . The appetites of newspaper readers are for the Kings and Stars and Villains and Dog-Biters...
...critic in 1938. But he had written many book reviews, and decided there wasn't much difference between one type of critic and another. He says: "All criticism is pretty much alike in this: you go in and say what you think. A good critic, to use Max Beerbohm's definition, is simply a cultivated man with brains and a temperament. Temperament includes both tastes and prejudices; a critic who didn't have them would be just a machine...
Near Rapallo, where he has lived for the past 40 years, Britain's famed Satirist Sir Max Beerbohm ("the inimitable Max") quietly passed his 80th birthday. Among his gifts: a privately printed scarlet-bound book containing tributes from such younger men of letters as Robert Graves, T. S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene...
...Literature," wrote Max Beerbohm, "has many a solemn masterpiece that one would without a qualm barter for that absurd and riotous one." In society, as in print, Gilbert began to establish himself as a formidable zany. When asked, for instance, if he had "seen a member of this club with one eye called Matthews," Gilbert shot back: "What's his other eye called?" He turned this compulsion for dialogue to the writing of plays, and was already the leading comic writer of the London stage when he was introduced to Sullivan...
...wittiest woman in the world," said Oscar Wilde of Ada Leverson. Others who admired Ada's sparkle were Max Beerbohm, Aubrey Beardsley, Henry James and George Bernard Shaw (whom she succeeded as drama critic of the Saturday Review). Venomous with bores, she flattened them joyfully. When a vacation acquaintance buttonholed her with "I don't know whether you realize it ... but my aunt was a Thunderby," Ada cried, "Oh, how terrible! Oughtn't we to inform the management?" Accused of using peroxide on her hair, she flashed that she "only darkened it a little at the roots...