“... leave out the Irish (by birth or upbringing), you lose Congreve, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Wilde and Shaw. The source that gave London The Importance of Being Earnest and Arms and the Man a hundred years ago shows no signs of drying up: Irish writers, whether resident in England or Ireland, remain a considerable presence on the London stage. Of course, Irish ...”

“... partridge-shooting country gent with intellectual tastes (‘a fathead and voluptuary’ Bernard Shaw called him in 1920 after he had blundered into some literary debate) with whom she remained on excellent terms after they had ceased to live together. Clive had plenty of affairs of his own, but was in his way a family man and a source of ...”

“... Dickens was only the first of many critics. Carlyle, Disraeli, Kingsley, Ruskin, Morris, Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Churchill, Beveridge – all arraigned it as morally indefensible. It punished not only the ‘undeserving’ poor (the ‘residuum’ or ‘underclass’ of incorrigibles) but the ‘deserving’ poor too – those indigent ...”

“... Spencer. They never missed a Harold Laski public lecture. They went in a solid phalanx to hear Shaw, Belloc and Chesterton debate at Kingsway Hall. And they formed an archaeological group to look for relics of Norman and Roman London whenever they happened to have freshly excavated building sites on their beats. Policemen don’t only look younger these ...”

“... leading men fell for her and she took her pick. She was famously married: Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, Frank Sinatra. Shaw was the cultivated one. He hated her walking round the house in her bare feet and was shocked to discover she had only ever read one book: Gone with the Wind. ‘I left before he had a chance to flunk ...”

“... galleys were demanding attention he couldn’t give them. On 6 November he complained to Harriet Shaw Weaver that ‘working as I do amid piles of notes at a table in a hotel I cannot possibly do this mechanical part with my wretched eye and a half.’ He evidently decided that he couldn’t do much about the printer’s errors in time for the birthday, but ...”

“... with the frankly socialist movement associated with such names as Keir Hardie, Tom Mann and John Burns, but Bernard Shaw (in spite of his philandering, of which Beatrice strongly disapproved) was a regular guest at the famous Webb lunches. Manual workers were conspicuous by their absence. Possibly Beatrice never quite ...”

“... include studies of prominent writers as well as politicians – Wells and Bennett, Conrad and Shaw, as well as Lloyd George and his master, Beaverbrook – show a deeper talent for serious portraiture. The sketch, reproduced in this book, for his Asquith, described by Low as ‘aloof, old, worn, uncommunicative and more than a little crusty’, is ...”

“... because of her interest in folklore and her knowledge of the area around Coole and its people. ‘John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought/All that we did, all that we said or sang/Must come from contact with the soil.’ Much of Yeats’s work on Irish folklore was, as Foster points out, a collaboration with Lady Gregory.Lady Gregory also wrote ...”

“... In this instance, the Bible as a book was an effective instrument of change. The Gospel of John puzzles Schniedewind, as it does most of us. ‘John’s own written work,’ he writes, ‘began by defining the true Word as a person, not a text: “In the beginning was the Word (...”

“... he opted for schemes that make us shudder today.’ At the same time as Coren’s assault, John Carey in The Intellectuals and the Masses branded Wells an inveterate despiser of the common man. All in all, 1992 was a bad year for the Wellsian cause. Coren’s book was dealt with in this paper by Patrick Parrinder (8 April 1993). Parenthetically ...”

“... This will come.’ Wagnerites across Europe brimmed with millenarian expectation; George Bernard Shaw compared their sectarian struggles to the Wars of Religion.What Wagner stood for was continuously reimagined by those working in his shadow. Their engagement can be measured not just in quotations, but also in deliberate mistranslation, parody and ...”

“... a condition unavoidably endured with little prospect of relief. It may well be, as George Bernard Shaw once put it, that ‘the greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty,’ but it is easier to express outrage at its existence than to raise hopes as to its eradication. The history of the world is the history of many things, but in most places, at ...”

“... banks of the Thames. Waldorf and Nancy hosted epic house parties there, welcoming, among others, Shaw, Amy Johnson, Roosevelt (F.D.), Henry Ford, Asquith, Charlie Chaplin, J.M. Barrie, Churchill, Henry James, Edith Wharton, kings and queens and Mahatma Gandhi. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand spent a weekend there not long before his assassination. By the ...”

“... are not lies’. He gives us Casanova and Kim Philby, Shere Hite on faking orgasms, and Bernard Shaw on the need to lie to children. The publishers tell us the editor has included one wholly invented entry, and promised a bottle of champagne to the first five reviewers who spot it. I have failed to do so: but I am sure their offer is in good faith, and if ...”