Henry Maximilian Beerbohm, always known as Max, is a classic instance of the artist-writer with notable achievements in both fields--a specialty, almost a monopoly, of English cultural history: other examples include William Blake, William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James McNeill Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley, Wyndham Lewis, and David Jones. Some of Beerbohm's best literary criticism, expressed in the drawings of The Poets' Corner (1904) and Rossetti and His Circle (1922), is collected in Beerbohm's Literary Caricatures (1977), the captions often being as pointed and witty as the drawings.

In a radio talk ("London Revisited," in Mainly on the Air, 1946) he said with light irony, "I was born within sound of Bow Bells. I am in fact a genuine Cockney (as you will already have guessed by my accent)." His father, Julius Ewald Beerbohm, a prosperous grain merchant in the City of London, was a native of Memel on the Baltic and was...