From its magnificent first sentence, "None, it is said, of all who revelled with the Regent, was half so wicked as Lord George Hell..." The Happy Hypocrite exerts a hypnotizing charm. Sir Max Beerbohm's 'fairy tale for tired men' is one of the pinnacles of 1890s chic and elegance. His famously rich style, laced with equal parts of tenderness and severity, serves up a story of love, and, more importantly, what we will do for it. George Hell's life as a Regency buck is turned upside down when Jenny Mere, a dancer, arrives in his life. It only remains for him to live up to the pure expectations...

Max Beerbohm's erudite wit and playful conceits represent the pinnacle of the Aesthetic period's capacity to laugh at itself whilst celebrating itself. This book was the author's first, and was presented by him (with tongue lodged firmly in cheek) as a 'collected works', an august memorial to a brilliant career. Included are all seven of his major early essays: Dandies and Dandies on the important distinction between true Regency foppery and its cruder modern notion; A Good Prince portraying the future Edward VIII as an already demanding baby monarch; 1880 and its very recent but already...

How very delightful Grego's drawings are For all their mad perspective and crude colour, they have indeed the sentiment of style, and they reveal, with surer delicacy than does any other record, the spirit of Mr. Brummell's day. Grego guides me, as Virgil Dante, through all the mysteries of that other world. He shows me those stiff-necked, over-hatted, wasp-waisted gentlemen, drinking Burgundy in the Cafe des Milles Colonnes or riding through the village of Newmarket upon their fat cobs or gambling at Crockford's. Grego's Green Room of the Opera House always delights me. The formal way in...