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“... he treated the casts of his plays as if they were his drama pupils, a habit that provoked, as Ms Peters records, mild remonstrance from some established players. Yet his tuition was necessary – precisely because he composed plays as though they were operas and required actors to approach his lines of dialogue as though they were singers approaching a vocal ...”

“... male society’. John Cornford fought in Spain as a zealous young Communist, but his letters to Margot Heinemann reflect the same first-term-in-a-new-school excitement, the same all-male exhilaration. ‘I did quite well that day,’ he said of his success in rescuing a gun from the enemy. ‘He did well here, and died bloody well,’ he observed on another ...”

“... social reticence and self-questioning. Some fall on the side of censuring her excess; others, like Margot Peters in Unquiet Soul (1975), wish to cut away the anxiety or attribute it to patriarchy rather than personality (how do we separate self from circumstance?). Charlotte’s desire to be published stands in contrast, at least so it appears, to ...”

“... Shaw showed an almost compulsive tendency to fall in love. That near-compulsion is documented in Margot Peters’s Bernard Shaw and the Actresses, which I wrote about in the London Review of Books in July 1981. Her book deals cardinally with the teacher-pupil and playwright-actress relationship that Mr Silver correctly takes to be the centre of ...”