Ten years ago N. John Hall published his first biography, a life of Anthony Trollope. Now he has brought out a biography of Max Beerbohm. At first sight the contrast is a piquant one. On the one hand, the prolific commonsensical novelist, on the other the exquisite caricaturist and wit. It looks like switching from beef and pudding to caviar.

In fact the gap between the two men is not as wide as their respective reputations suggest. There was a robust, even conventional side to Beerbohm. His reaction to the First World War, for example, was staunchly patriotic; he loved music-halls (one taste at least which he shared with his bête noire Kipling); he had no problem about writing a column for the mass-circulation Daily Mail. He was very fond, for that matter, of the novels of Trollope. And those novels in turn, when you get down to them, display far more delicacy than they are generally given credit for.

Still, a Trollope biography and a Beerbohm biography remain very different undertakings, and, in turning to Beerbohm, Hall has adopted a much lighter and more informal approach. Where possible he lets Beerbohm speak for himself, but he also pops up all over the place, making it clear that he is the one who, in his own phrase, is “putting on the show.” He recounts the main events of Beerbohm’s career in roughly chronological order, but he also zips around as the fancy takes him. A minor