World, The: Archer as theatre critic 81, 82, 160, 177, 213, 311; Shaw as art critic 82–7, 121, and music critic (as G.B.S.) 135–40, 146, 173–4, 185; Lady Colin Campbell as art critic 162
Wright, (Sir) Almroth 341–2, 343–4
The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage 342
Wright, Mrs Theodore 166
Wyndham, (Sir) Charles 180, 228
Wynne, Michael 808
Yang Xingfo 653, 654
Yates, Edmund 81, 82, 121, 135, 185
Yeats, W. B.: and Florence Farr 141, 144, 170, 174, 175, 176; on Todhunter’s A Comedy of Sighs 171; at first night of Arms and the Man 172; as model for Marchbanks 179; founds Irish Literary Theatre and Irish National Theatre Society 302, 600; invites Shaw to write for Abbey Theatre 303; on John Bull’s Other Island 306, 307; stages The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet 379–81, 598; on Lena Ashwell 391; on The Apple Cart 574; and Shaw 596–8, 599; and O’Casey 598; challenges censorship of Black Girl 672; mentioned 347, 531; Shaw to 302, 303, 672
Cathleen Ni Houlihan 380, 596
‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ 473
‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ 473
The King’s Threshold 302
The Land of Heart’s Desire 170, 171, 172, 597
A Pot of Broth 302
‘The Second Coming’ 490
The Trembling of the Veil 786
The Wanderings of Oisin 58
You Never Can Tell see Shaw: Works
Young, Hilton (Lord Kennet) 538; Shaw to 538
Young, Kathleen see Scott, Kathleen
Young Men of Great Britain 34
Ysaÿe, Eugène 139
Zaharoff, (Sir) Basil 315
Zetetical Society 75, 101
‘Zinoviev Letter’ 618
Zola, Emile: La Terre 121
Zweig, Stefan 731
About Bernard Shaw
Playwright, wit, socialist, polemicist, vegetarian and charmer, Bernard Shaw was a controversial literary figure, the scourge of Victorian values and middle-class pretensions.
This is Michael Holroyd’s essential biography of George Bernard Shaw for the general reader, with its pace and verve, its comedy, drama and politics, it shows a provocative and paradoxical figure sympathetically and movingly portrayed.
Reviews
“A masterly exercise in biographical magic.”
Spectator
“This elegant volume gives the quintessence of Shaw...[it does] justice to a great Irishman.”
Irish Independent
“A man whose art rested as much upon the exercise of inteligence could not have chosen a more intelligent biographer.”
The Times
About Michael Holroyd
Besides the biographies of Augustus John, Bernard Shaw and Lytton Strachey, Michael Holroyd has written two volumes of memoirs, Basil Street Blues and Mosaic. He was president of the Royal Society of Literature from 2003–2008 and is the only non-fiction writer to have been awarded the British Literature Prize. He lives in London and Somerset with his wife, the novelist Margaret Drabble.
Also by this Author
Lytton Strachey
Lytton Strachey, genius, wit, iconoclast, biographer, pacifist, and homosexual campaigner, was at the nexus of the literary and artistic life of Bloomsbury. In the 1960s he was seen as a progenitor of the hippy cult. Now he appears as a far more subversive and challenging figure. He revolutionised the writing of biography and smuggled deviant sexual behaviour into our history in his reassessment of Elizabethan and Victorian times. For this re-telling of his story Holroyd has had access to published and unpublished material unavailable in the 1960s when his biography of Strachey first appeared. In many of Bloomsbury’s three-cornered relationships, he had only two sides of the triangle. Now he has all three, and in a new social and political climate can tell the full story of this extraordinary world with candour, sympathy and sexual explicitness. He has cut 100, 000 words, revised much of the text and added a wealth of new material, about Strachey himself, about Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, Rupert Brooke and most vividly about the tragic life of Strachey’s companion Dora Carrington.
Lytton Strachey is available from Head of Zeus from Spring 2015.
Augustus John
This 1997 revised and updated biography of the celebrated artist, using the mass of new material which has come to light since Holroyd’s two-volume first edition in the mid 1970s, reveals the complete story of John and his circle, from one of our great biographers.
John studied at the Slade with his sister Gwen before both of them went to Paris. He lived and worked at feverish speed and his drawings were astonishing for their fluid lyrical line, their vigour and spontaneity. His life became a complex tale of two cities, London and Paris, of two wives and many families. ‘The age of Augustus John was dawning,’ Virginia Woolf wrote of the year 1908, which saw many portraits of writers and artists and small glowing oil panels of figures in a landscape. His most striking work was done in the years before the First World War and when he died in 1961 his death was treated as a landmark signalling the end of a distant era.
Augustus John is available from Head of Zeus from Spring 2015.
Great Lives: Literary Lives
If you enjoyed this book, we would like to recommend these related titles from our biography collection Great Lives that you may also enjoy reading.
Lytton Strachey
by Michael Holroyd
The essential biography of Lytton Strachey.
The Most Dangerous Book
by Kevin Birmingham
The extraordinary and exhilarating story of James Joyce’s 15-year battle to publish his masterpiece, Ulysses.
Lives of the Poets
by Michael Schmidt
A stunning volume of epic breadth which connects the lives and works of over 300 English-language poets of the last 700 years.
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The story starts here.
First published in Great Britain in 1997 by Vintage
This edition first published in the UK in 2011 Pimlico
This ebook edition first published in the UK in 2015 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Michael Holroyd, 1997
Bernard Shaw by Michael Holroyd was originally published in four volumes.
Volume 1 The Search for Love 1856–1898, Volume 2 The Pursuit of Power 1898–1918, Volume 3 The Lure of Fantasy 1918–1950, Volume 4 (Epilogue) The Last Laugh by Chatto & Windus © Michael Holroyd 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, and reprinted by Penguin Books Ltd in 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993. This present edition is a substantial abridgement, with revisions, of the complete work by the author
The moral right of Michael Holroyd to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (E) 9781784971403
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