Zuleika Dobson – Max Beerbohm

First published 1911 – the top entry in Susan Sontag’s ‘Random items which are part of the canon of Camp’ from her 1964 essay ‘Notes on Camp’.

And although I have had this image stored on my computer for some months now, I suddenly realize, having posted it, that we are back once again with a falling man, a woman and a balcony – some impressions are evidently harder to shake off than I had imagined.

‘But all fantasy should have a solid basis in reality; and to any young readers of the book it may seem that my presentment of Oxford life was a wild infraction of that law. Let me assure them that my fantasy was far more like to the old Oxford than was the old Oxford like to the place now besieged and invaded by Lord Nuffield’s armies.’ M.B. 1946