The Inimitable GBS

The most famous European writer of the first half of the twentieth century was not Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Mann, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Rilke, Lawrence, Brecht, Gide, or Pasternak. In fact, if one could somehow quantify literary celebrity, I suspect these dozen immortals would scarcely make up his sum. Perhaps the most surprising revelation in Michael Holroyd’s immense biography is the degree to which this period was the Age of Shaw. His plays were performed, his books sold, his le...