Zuleika Dobson. Or, An Oxford Love Story

Sir Henry Maximilian "Max" Beerbohm was, like his friend Oscar Wilde, such an acclaimed wit (and essayist, caricaturist, and parodist) that George Bernard Shaw dubbed him "the incomparable Max." But Beerbohm's comic masterpiece Zuleika Dobson-one of the Modern Library's top 100 English-language novels of the twentieth century-is the only novel he ever wrote. Strangely out of print in the United States for years, this crackling farce is nonetheless as piercing and fresh as when it first appeared in 1911: a hilarious dismantling of academia and privilege, and a swashbuckling lampooning of class systems and notions of masculine virtue.
The all-male campus of Oxford-Beerbohm's alma mater-is a place where aesthetics holds sway above all else, and where witty intellectuals reign. Things haven't changed for its privileged student body for years .