“... highbrows who prattled on about them. At a meeting of Edwardian Fabians attended by George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb, Attlee whispered to his brother: ‘Do we have to grow a beard to join this show?’ The confident pre-1914 left, he later reflected, had been too rigid in its scientific approach to social problems and altogether ‘too Webby’. Socialist ...”

“... precisely the sort of instinctive apprehension that was lost on someone like George Bernard Shaw, who, equipped as he was with an all-encompassing theory of the world, ‘has all the time been silently comparing humanity with something that was not human’. Shaw was typical of the heresy of sterile ...”

“... and therapeutic efficacy of medical procedures are carried out either on the poor, as Bernard Shaw implied in the uproariously funny preface to The Doctor’s Dilemma, or upon prisoners, for as Voltaire records in his letters from England, the efficacy and safety of variolation against smallpox was carried out with the enthusiastic connivance of King and ...”

“... promiscuously and, above all, prolifically across literature, journalism and social criticism (Shaw and Chesterton come most readily to mind) also enjoyed a kind of celebrity in this period that they probably could not have attained before or after. As Jonathan Rose has observed about the explosion of print towards the close of the 19th century: ‘Lord ...”

“... When Johnson was depressed she was ‘pipped’, and when she was Cleopatra in the local am-dram (Shaw, of course, not Shakespeare), ‘the play went simply marvellously! Raging success’ and had ‘awfully good notices’ in the local paper. She was born in 1912 and grew up the adored only child in a fractious household of women, with her mother, Amy, her ...”

“... the linear and upright form of the male phallus.’) She wickedly lampoons Ammons and Patrick Shaw for finding lurking sexual symbols, such as giant wombs and fallopian tubes, in Cather’s frequent descriptions of Midwestern scenery. (‘No tree can grow, no river flow, in Cather’s landscapes,’ Acocella notes, ‘without this being a penis or a ...”

“... but that’s because we have a monarchy which is not only a religion but a popular cult: it’s Michael Jackson as well as Runcie. The younger royals instinctively understand that they are a sort of super pop-star, and, while they may occasionally complain about it, the fact is that, as any pop star must, they court tabloid attention, are indeed largely ...”

“... of the truth.’ Style can be a dangerous thing, as Taylor himself pointed out about the later Shaw (‘verbal felicity, nothing to say’). There are times when the sheer verbal excitement of a Taylor paragraph can detract from its meaning: you remember the phrases, not what they are saying. The tension builds up as these short sentences follow each ...”

“... pride. As the Irish nation wallowed in its ‘liberation’, a Jesuit priest called Father Francis Shaw submitted an essay to the Jesuit journal Studies which contained what Roy Foster calls a ‘swingeing exposé of lacunae in [Patrick] Pearse’s ideology’. The piece was not published for six years. The editors felt that Ireland was not ready for a ...”

“... the saints who visited her, when, for instance, she was pressed at her trial to specify whether St Michael wore wings or not. What Miss Warner emphasises, however, is that her experience was not of mystical rapture, but had a mundane, realistic bearing: she was being instructed to leave Domrémy and undertake a mission for her bleeding country, and this ...”

“... be nothing after The Rivals and The School for Scandal until the emergence of Pinero, Wilde and Shaw over a century later. There is surely a simple explanation for this. The Rivals and The School for Scandal are among the most adept of British comedies precisely because they are fundamentally empty of the kind of abrasive content that characterises the less ...”

“... man has no ready buttress for his self-regard. That historian is fictional: he is the narrator of Michael Young’s 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy. But the only thing significantly off the mark about his dystopian predictions is that his narrator is saying these things, as opposed to merely thinking them. Mount’s Uppers do, broadly speaking, think ...”

“... and first wife in Vienna, his third wife in Hungary, and close friends (notably Lewis Namier and Michael Karolyi) among émigré intellectuals and political refugees. His later ‘plain man’ affectations notwithstanding, he was multilingual, well-travelled and knowledgeable about European music, architecture and wine. Wrigley brings out those connections ...”

“... how they spent the leisure time that the magazines of the 1890s loved to celebrate. George Bernard Shaw listed his recreations as ‘cycling and showing off’.Today’s Who’s Who remains a child of the 1890s. The editorial board stands by the book’s original intention, to recognise people whose ‘prominence is inherited, or depending upon office, or the ...”

“... generation (born since 1995), Gen Z Explained, Robert Katz, Sarah Ogilvie, Jane Shaw and Linda Woodhead find students sifting through online materials and module choices in search of whatever seems most ‘relevant’ to them personally, or to the task they happen to be engaged with at that moment.* This behaviour is both instinct and coping ...”