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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 (...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of light entertainment broadcasting in the 1950s. He once introduced a talk by George Bernard Shaw. ‘Young man,’ Shaw said, pointing to the microphone, ‘this is a devilish contraption. You can’t deceive it – so don’t try.’ Gamlin later said he remembered all his life the genial advice ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... monsters like Zavenyagin and Maltsev, from sages like David Lilienthal to bumblers like Milton Shaw, from grey eminences like Edward Bridges to flamboyant publicists like Homi Bhabha. They may at times seem like pasteboard cut-outs, with stereotyped features brushed on, but one easily recognises some very remarkable characters in this army of crusaders. It ...”

“... and reliable’. The volume has attractive and well-chosen photographs, notably one of a posturing Shaw rehearsing his cast in Androcles and another of the Evelyn Waugh family warily grouped at their garden gate. Gertrude Lawrence is pictured twice, once in her own right, once with Coward. The trawl is ...”