"My gifts are small," Max Beerbohm once observed. "I've used them very well and discreetly, never straining them; and the result is that I've made a charming little reputation." Beerbohm, a well-known caricaturist, drama critic, and essayist, wrote only one novel, Zuleika Dobson (1911), but that fantasy of Edwardian undergraduate life at Oxford is a classic.

Henry Maximilian Beerbohm was born in London on 24 August 1872. He was the youngest child of Julius Ewald Beerbohm and his second wife (and former sister-in-law), Eliza Draper Beerbohm. One of Beerbohm's half brothers was the noted actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree (eighteen years his senior), who was later to introduce Beerbohm to Oscar Wilde and other theatrical personalities of the time, as well as to supply Beerbohm with a succession of fianceés from his acting troupe.

Beerbohm was educated at Charterhouse and Merton College, Oxford. He drew on his experiences from this...