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“... Virgin and Child, and an object resembling a hairy man – ‘some say a hermit, others think John the Baptist.’Kircher’s contemporaries puzzled over fossilised animals and their distribution. The Walloon mathematician René-François de Sluse wrote to the Royal Society in London enclosing a sketch of stones resembling shellfish: ‘It is strange that ...”

“... proving that the author of the Odyssey was a woman, crossing swords in Shavian style with Bernard Shaw. An admirable, indeed an indispensable, literary sub-species, but not the sort who leaves behind either little masterpieces or great works of art. And yet Virginia Woolf, writing in 1916, not only called him a rare spirit, ‘one of those whom we like, or it ...”

“... rather, and the tones, are those of the old artificer, the father of the tribe, Simon Dedalus, John Stanislaus Joyce. Like the violins of Cremona, Dubliners, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake are the products of a joint concern, a family undertaking. Joyce himself was frank about this. As long as he had escaped he could still be in the bosom of the family. As long ...”

“... Granville-Barker’s policy was to put on new plays exclusively, among which were his own and Shaw’s. Of the 32 plays which he presented over a period of three years, including premieres of Galsworthy, Ibsen and Maeterlink, 11 were new plays by Shaw. In addition to running the theatre and writing ...”

“... the show is that we relate to them just enough to make it unalienating – it’s cold-but-warm. Shaw might have been wrong-headed to say that Coriolanus was Shakespeare’s greatest comedy because none of the characters is likeable, but his remark is acute as an observation about what tilts a show towards the comic. Jesse Armstrong, the creator of ...”

“... She was eight years older than him, with fabled taste and impeccable manners, and counted Shaw, Berenson, Churchill and Léon Bakst among her friends. ‘I’m in a complete rut. I lunch and dine with Linda Thomas every day, and between times, call her up on the telephone,’ he wrote to his bosom buddy from Yale, the actor Monty Woolley. ‘She ...”

“... Carter puts it online, claiming that it’s a 1928 recording of ‘Graveyard Blues’ by Charlie Shaw, a name he has made up. And ‘in the tiny confines of the prewar blues internet, it was like someone had dropped a bomb.’ Collectors go crazy, offering thousands of dollars for the record. One of them, who calls himself JumpJim and writes everything in ...”

“... society’s early members included David Cecil, Roger Fry, J.B.S. Haldane, Julian Huxley, Augustus John, Keynes, Shaw, St Loe Strachey, Ellen Terry and Wells. Stories appeared in the press about ‘the big cars, the women in striking hats, the well-known Bloomsbury figures making themselves conspicuous in the audience with ...”

“... even a photograph, with this prose picture of Osbert Sitwell, served up as Lord Osmund Finnian-Shaw. In colour Lord Osmund was pale coral, with flaxen hair brushed tightly back, his blond pencilled pap rising straight from his sloping forehead: galb-like wings to his nostrils – the goat-like profile of Edward the Peacemaker. The lips were curved. They ...”

“... as 1964, taxed him mischievously: ‘What is all this nonsense about being called the Master?’ Shaw, who prophesied success for the fledgling playwright in 1921, warned him ‘never to fall into an essential breach of good manners’. He didn’t. A star is his own greatest invention. Coward’s plays and songs were primarily vehicles to launch his elegant ...”

“... tell the BBC that there is a multitude of one-act plays by classic authors, Chekhov, Strindberg, Shaw, which are good theatre,’ and which could have been used instead. The head of radio drama, Martin Esslin – not an English name, she observed – replied to Whitehouse that the play was simply a comedy about a steam engine enthusiast who wanted to turn an ...”

“... Grayshott was home, or home away from home, to the Hilltop set, a group that included Conan Doyle, Shaw, Tennyson and Christina Rossetti. The town was modern, fashionably suburban and connected by a new railway line to London, just close enough for something of fashion and suggestions of sex. Richard Le Gallienne, one of Aubrey Beardsley’s friends, ‘raced ...”

“... painter is entirely of one kind or the other, and fate clearly has a hand in the matter. Augustus John, who was generally of the first sort, had ambitions beyond the marketable portraits which sustained him and his reputation in the latter part of his life. His early drawings persuaded some critics that a great painter was about to emerge, but his figure ...”

“... of the Scottish painter Craigie Aitchison. Tree behind a Wall, from 1936, could be a George Shaw. But Spilliaert is best seen in his own time, in the moody coastal gloom of Ostend, and the shadowy rooms of his ...”

“... six days after the Woolwich bombing. Were it not for the need to get Hill convicted of the Shaw killing in Belfast in order to weaken further any defence he was to offer to the Guildford charges, these trials would probably have been over in weeks rather than months. This is not the timetable of detection: it is the timetable of LA Law, a scenario in ...”