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“... of In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Life and Times of Michael K (1983), to the confessional monologue of Age of Iron (1990) and the literary-historical pastiches of Foe (1986) and The Master of Petersburg (1994), Coetzee’s approach has been varied, his idiom pliable. He has written in the voice of a repressed ...”

“... life and death of Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor, or Tussy. A work that features Engels, Bernard Shaw, Olive Schreiner and Havelock Ellis among the dramatis personae might seem doomed to go the way of Brown’s Savonarola. The adroitness with which the author skirts this risk is only one aspect of an unusual clear-sightedness and sense of proportion. She ...”

“... ethic. He was going to get the job done and nothing would distract him. He looked more like Robert Shaw, the great villain in From Russia with Love, than like any other Bond. He was unshaken, unstirred; dogged not feline, a terrier who made us wonder what those sleek, overdressed catlike figures had been doing these 44 years. Even his smart suits looked like ...”

“... similarity to Vonnegut, and known influence on him, is possibly less flattering: George Bernard Shaw. Critics of Vonnegut have sometimes remarked with some justice on the haziness or orthodoxy of what appear to be uncompromised and uncompromising declarations of belief by him. In these moments one can see why Vonnegut enjoys so greatly the ...”

“... morning the building was a blackened shell.’Afterwards a telegram arrived from George Bernard Shaw: ‘You must be delighted. Congratulations. It will be a tremendous advantage to have a proper modern building. There are a number of other theatres I should like to see burned down.’ Shaw had opened the final season in ...”

“... in his belief that Maud Gonne’s beauty was of ‘a kind not natural in an age like this’. Shaw called her ‘outrageously beautiful’ and W.T. Stead, who could no more than Yeats isolate his admiration for her looks from an appraisal of her politics, described her as ‘one of the most beautiful women in the world’, going on to point out that ...”

“... his novels, and there was another in 1970, when the same edition was republished with prefaces by Michael Holroyd. Gerhardie himself prefixed to the reissue of his first book, Futility, an important essay called ‘My Literary Credo’, which is unfortunately omitted from the new Penguin Modern Classics reprint. (Futility is the only novel in ...”

“... In 1644, the Puritan cleric John Shaw journeyed up to Westmorland to instruct the local people, who, he had been told, were sadly lacking in knowledge of the Bible. The need was confirmed when he interrogated an old man whose long life in the wake of the Reformation seemed to have left him entirely ignorant of all matters theological and ecclesiastical ...”

“... 16 proposals; but then, she was only 17 when she accepted, and 18 when she married 24-year-old Bob Shaw. He was the playboy son of a rich Bostonian family and kept a permanent mistress. Nancy found she hated sex. She was still complaining about it after she had borne a daughter and four sons to her second husband, Waldorf Astor, and she ‘proudly’ informed ...”

“... Imperial Edwardian tone of much that was to follow – was made by the back elevation of Norman Shaw’s Piccadilly Hotel. ‘It’s a grim business this new stone section of the Quadrant,’ C.H. Reilly wrote in 1922. ‘No one can deny the power of the design. The situation of a bull in a china shop is not improved by the magnificence of the bull.’ It ...”

“... have to ask where on the left are the modern equivalents of Annie Besant, Ben Tillett, Bernard Shaw – or Dr Barnardo, for that matter. One of the main problems for a modern Annie Besant to tackle is broadly the same as what the real Annie Besant had to deal with in 1888. By that year the Jewish settlement had consolidated itself in Tower Hamlets, fed by ...”

“... lionised and invited everywhere, but on a basis of mild but permanent misunderstanding. Bernard Shaw, he noticed, had a red nose and he wondered whether the famous abstinence was really as severe as claimed. Shaw said to him: ‘If you’re English you’re a genius, but if you’re Russian ... well then ... of course ...”

“... a batch of boisterous sons: George, Jack and Peter, when Barrie first met them; later there were Michael and Nico. Barrie was besotted. His relations with the family, playful and proprietorial, were ardent from the beginning. Sylvia encouraged Barrie’s insidious generosity. His devotion was flattering, without representing a threat to her ...”

“... Utopia.’ In at least two ways, however, Crosland’s put-down of the Webbs missed its target. As Shaw once explained, the Fabians had split off from the Fellowship of the New Life in the mid-l880s, ‘one to sit among the dandelions, the other to organise the docks’, and this anti-Utopian strain in Fabian thinking received its fullest articulation at the ...”

“... men don’t talk of such things,’ Lawrence wrote much later to his confidante, Charlotte Shaw (wife of GBS). Whatever the truth, it left him with a feeling of shame for ever after. Then, last, there’s his escape into anguished anonymity after the war, and his death, at the age of 46, in a motorcycle accident, which opens the ...”