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“... Bell’s caveat reminded me of being in Toronto once on litbiz and running into an exhausted Michael Holroyd, then world-touring the third volume of his Bernard Shaw biography. He explained his travails with a resigned good humour: ‘They keep asking me if I still like Shaw. It’s ...”

“... didacticism which saw itself as descending not from Coward and Wilde but from Brecht and Shaw. Well, how things change. Last year’s centenary of Brecht’s birth was marked in London by a single revival at the Almeida. Thus far, it looks as though the 50th anniversary of Shaw’s death next year will be ...”

“... often with non-publishing or foreign management at the highest level. Penguin, Hamish Hamilton, Michael Joseph, Frederick Warne and Longman – all once imprints with independent identities – now congregate within the Pearson group (best known for its ownership of the Financial Times). Random House UK (whose American parent was long since swallowed up by ...”

“... Michael Moorcock’s novel honours the loonies of London. It seems there are more of them every year, especially since – by one of the more perverse acts of enlightenment – the asylums were emptied in the Seventies. One sees the London mad everywhere in the streets and parks: ranters, mutterers, arm-wavers. The quieter cases are charitably allowed into the public bars of seedy pubs; I once saw one huddled over his light ale with an antique mahogany-cased ECT apparatus perched beside him ...”

“... reads like the cast-list of some bizarre Antipodean soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the tax-payer) of the tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious an advocate of anti-German ...”

“... in Stone’s Denmark. Hence in his contribution to the Traditio volume, the Roman historian Brent Shaw suggested: Artificial brotherhoods were formed for the purposes of protection, defence and armed aggression in a disintegrated social order in which the threat of violence and physical force was a real and ever present danger . . . The reasons for the ...”

“... warned, was the ‘rapid multiplication of the unfit’. Progressives like Havelock Ellis, Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb were swayed by these arguments, at least for a time; and Ellis (while condemning the Nazis’ racism and anti-semitism) defended Hitler’s ideas on compulsory sterilisation as late as 1937. The coming world state in Anticipations was called ...”

“... I’ve ever met’. From her own account, she impressed Einstein, charmed Göring and captivated Shaw. Often she seems to be providing a textbook example of confession as self-exoneration. Negri had been accused by many people of doing many unpalatable things. She had to prove that she had truly loved Valentino and not betrayed his memory; that she hadn’t ...”

“... brother, Fredo, who is weak and indecisive, and is eventually murdered by his younger brother, Michael, after he assumes control of the family business. Donald was most like the hot-headed Santino ‘Sonny’ Corleone, whose impulsiveness results in his assassination by rival gang members at a tollbooth. Donald has raced through many tollbooths, but has ...”

“... totalling eleven hundred pages, a fact which would have undoubtedly pleased their subject. Both Michael Newman’s ‘Political Biography’ and Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman’s ‘A Life on the Left’ rightly insist on their man’s public face. But even his political life was peculiar, if only because this profoundly political man never became a ...”

“... to establish a common style and tone, couldn’t resist announcing that Sidney Webb and Bernard Shaw would be writing for it. In 1925 the Spectator, after not quite a hundred years of unsigned articles, abandoned anonymity, and the New Statesman followed. Articles in the TLS remained anonymous until 1974, and obituaries in the Times and Telegraph are ...”

“... their heads and complained of the ‘bad Bengali’ – ‘the language does not taste well.’ Michael Datta (Madhusudan Datta, 1824-73), who took the name ‘Michael’ on his conversion to Christianity, was highly regarded as an innovator in Bengali blank verse and for his elevated Miltonic style. But he was never a ...”

“... were created, you feel, so that Kiberd could play his game with them. It is tempting to think that Shaw wrote John Bull’s Other Island and Brian Friel wrote Translations with Kiberd watching over them, egging them on. Both plays are full of the paradoxes proposed by England in Ireland and Ireland in England. The drama comes from the identity games which ...”

“... in the Sixties rather than the Fifties. The evidence, however, is far from convincing. As Michael Banton points out, there has been some reduction between the Sixties and the Eighties in standard social-distance scores, measured as willingness or otherwise to accept black people as neighbours, friends, fellow workers. He regards this as a reason for ...”

“... is evidence that all print media are corrupted, and that reading is a dying skill, don’t worry. Michael Crozier’s ‘how we did it’ account of the birth of the Independent, an account which resembles a parish-magazine post-mortem on the last jumble sale, patting many backs and giving hardly a hint of tantrums, proves that grey-flannel design is alive ...”