First, in The Happy Hypocrite, when the mischievous Cupid fires an arrow through the heart of Lord George Hell, that disreputable peer, desperate to win the love of sweetly innocent young Jenny Mere, obtains from fashionable mask-maker Mr Aeneas a saintly mask of true love to disguise his own wicked features; and in this hypocritical disguise, Lord George finds a new life, and a new morality.

And in Seven Men, a work described by Virginia Woolf as “a little masterpiece”, Beerbohm tells the stories of six men from the world of the 1890s – Beerbohm himself is the seventh man – with such an air of realism and so much circumstantial detail as to blur the boundary between fact and fiction, so that the reader is lulled almost into acceptance of the fantastic events that he describes, from the incredible journey of Enoch Soames, to the tragic history of A.V. Laider, or the strange rivalry of literary lions Maltby and Braxton… For some inexplicable reason, this masterpiece of satire has not previously attracted the attention of professional narrators.