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BOOK REVIEWS as a kind of dalliance. I am concerned that this lightness may undersell the rigorous research that contributed to the content. At times, it feels like Hall is merely giving us notes: "Shaw. I am saving Max on Shaw. Ibsen ." Hall's editorial, interpretive decisions sometimes take more of a center stage than necessary. Max Beerbohm stopped drawing caricatures when he realized that they were becoming likenesses: "Pity crept in. So I gave up caricaturing ...." Inversely, as he portrays Max in older age, Hall's voice begins to feel less staged and gains from it. At this point, Hall writes less as a dandy and more as the devoted fan and critic he is. (Hall was, in fact, among the reverential at the staged Enoch Soames Centenary at the British Museum in 1997.) In the last chapter, we witness his delight when on a pilgrimage to Beerbohm's home in Rapallo he converses with Beerbohm's Italian neighbors and meets the young woman who has inherited (and sleeps on) Max's bed. This is a valuable biography: it is illuminating on subjects as diverse as Beerbohm's admiration for Swinburne and Strachey, his satires of royalty and their political fallout, his radio persona as a link with the past, and his development as a graphic artist. It ends with a bibliography of Beerbohm's work; a list of biography, criticism and manuscript depositories ; notes; and a comprehensive index. A testimony to Hall's admiration and affection for Beerbohm, it is also a welcome addition to current scholarship on the fin-de-siècle and Edwardian eras. DIANA MALTZ __________________ Southern Oregon University A Journal from the Great War Edward Heron-Allen's Journal of the Great War: From Sussex Shore to Flanders Fields. Brian W Harvey and Carol Fitzgerald, eds. West Sussex: Phillimore & Co. Ltd., 2002. xxii + 282 pp. £20.00 THIS IS A TEXT remarkable for its close observation of the details of the writer's world—his houses, his family, his friends and neighbors in his Sussex village, his London life, and then, as the title promises, the Western Front as the war unfolds, cataclysm occurs, the world changes. It's the changes, the reordering of social relations, their careful recording and Heron-Allen's often ambivalent but not disingenuous responses that make this journal so fascinating to read. The journal begins the day the war begins. Its purpose: "to record the events of the war and the impressions they create upon private people 452 ELT 47 : 4 2004 and families. Not the historical facts. . . . Memories to be interesting must be purely personal___Therefore this midnight of % August 1914,1 begin this journal. I shall be profoundly grateful and pleasantly surprised if it is very short and uneventful." In the event it was neither and the volume we have represents only about twenty-five percent of the pages filled over the next five years, the last entry occurring on 1 July 1919, where he wonders whether the peace would last the year. Even before the war's end and the disastrous articles of the Versailles treaty, he foresaw an inconclusive peace, followed by "social revolution or economic war and then we'll be at war with Germany again." One is struck over and over at the prescience of many of his observations and predictions , even when one finds the ideological assumptions behind some of them unattractive at the very least. Witness his scepticism if not scorn for those involved in creating the League of Nations: "it is a counsel of perfection, attractive to social cranks." Reading Leonard Woolf or Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson at such moments is a necessary corrective. In August 1914 Heron-Allen is not quite 53, recently retired from the legal profession, but still assiduously at work on his main scientific pursuit , the study of a class of protozoa, the Foraminifera (during these years he served as President of the Microscopical Society and in 1919 became a Fellow of the Royal Society). He had earlier made a name for himself as a student of chiromancy or palmistry, going through the United States on a lecture tour and writing two books on the subject, although he was...

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