Seldom can any author have taken Horace’s dictum that the artist should delight and instruct as seriously as did Bernard Shaw. The notion of art for art’s sake, the guiding principle for so many ...

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, critic and polemicist whose influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond.

THE publishers of this book describe it as the “most Boswellian biography since Boswell’s Johnson.” That is an exaggeration; it contains only a few recorded conversations and its chief resemblance to ...