“... miserably when it was produced in New York in 1923 and it is easy to see why. In the era of Shaw, O’Neill and Strindberg, de Acosta still worked almost entirely – as if obliviously – in the obsolete vein of 19th-century melodrama. In the opening scene, when various foppish courtiers gossip about Simonetta – she is supposed to be the mistress of ...”

“... like the whiff of cordite long after the gun has been fired. When I mention this to David Cornwell/John le Carré, he says: ‘I can still feel it in my nostrils now.’ Historians, like spooks, need a sensitive nose, Orwell’s ‘Sniff, sniff’ for the detection of ‘all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls’.3 (And, in ...”

“... himself for being subject to them.He had been trying to finish his fellowship dissertation on ‘John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama’ (he did win a fellowship, but not until 1913). He wasn’t sleeping; Olivier said he seemed ‘dotty & queer’, liable to say or think ‘horrors’. He didn’t even pay all that much attention to the publication of his ...”

“... the First World War. His masters, as he himself acknowledged, were H.L. Mencken and George Bernard Shaw. Even the most ideologically liquored-up combatant in the culture wars of the last couple of decades might blanch at taking them as models. The sobering fact is that, by the time ‘the last intellectuals’ were in their pomp, it was already too late for ...”

“... the Sierra Madre, and a friendly profile of its director in Life, led to an invitation to work for John Huston. He wrote an adaptation of Stephen Crane’s story ‘The Blue Hotel’, which Huston did not use but liked enough to give him another project, The African Queen. Later Agee collaborated with Charles Laughton on the screenplay of Davis Grubb’s ...”

“... Bernhardt tease. The ‘childishly egotistical character of her acting’, George Bernard Shaw observed, is not the art of making you think more highly or feel more deeply, but the art of making you admire her, pity her, champion her, weep with her, laugh at her jokes, follow her fortunes breathlessly, and applaud her wildly when the curtain falls ...”

“... and it trumps all other considerations. We are all, apparently, believers in what George Bernard Shaw once dubbed ‘the Gospel of Getting On’. How, on the other hand, can we know with any reliability what ‘we’ all ‘believe’ in? This is what social surveys are supposed, not least by politicians, to tell us. Among these surveys, British Social ...”

“... of the socialist weekly the New Age, then in the ascendant as the publisher of George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells.Mansfield’s​ first story to be published in England, ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’, appeared in the New Age in February 1910:The Frau got out of bed, walked in a determined fashion into the kitchen, returning with a bundle of twigs in her ...”

“... up the British Empire and thus further [sic] the world revolution.’ If only people like Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell had been so clear-sighted. The failure to secure even a hearing, let alone recognition, from Wilson in Paris did not discourage the Dáil Government from pursuing this issue in the United States itself, where the strongest popular and ...”

“... their profit-eyed, zoned-out heroes.Prince​ was born on 7 June 1958 in Minneapolis. His father, John L. Nelson, was 42 at the time; his mother, Mattie Shaw, was 25. His first name was the one his father performed under in a local jazz combo: Prince Rogers. During Prince’s teenage years it was a volatile ...”

“... had another connection to Jane Elgee before her marriage. In a letter to his son William in 1921, John Butler Yeats wrote of Jane Wilde: ‘When she was Miss Elgee, Mrs Butt found her with her husband when the circumstances were not doubtful, and told my mother about it.’ Butt enjoyed various romances, and was, on occasion, heckled at public meetings by the ...”

“... above all, the charmed, successful Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady (Maureen had certainly not read Shaw, for whom Colin evinced another of his hatreds). Nancy’s songs were very much a feature of Maureen’s repertoire, but with Eliza she had a daily complicity. Eliza’s songs, both before and after Higgins’s breakthrough, were forever on her lips. When ...”