Bernard Shaw: The Lure of Fantasy, 1918-1951: 3 - Tapa dura

Holroyd's multivolume life of Bernard Shaw was published, it was hailed as a masterpiece, and William Golding predicted that it would take its place "among the great biographies." Now the biography is available for the first time in a lively and accessible abridgment by the author. This is the quintessence of Shaw. The narrative has a new verve and pace, and the light and shade of Shaw's world are more dramatically revealed as Holroyd counterpoints the private and public Shaw with inimitable insight and scholarship.
        Playwright, wit, socialist, polemicist, vegetarian, and irresistible charmer, Bernard Shaw was the most controversial literary figure of his age, the scourge of Victorian values and middle-class pretensions. Born in Dublin in 1856, he grew up there, a lonely child in an unsettling ménage à trois. His father, George Carr Shaw, had turned to drink, and his mother was muse to a Svengali-like music teacher whom she foll

Michael Holroyd was born in 1935 and is part Irish and half Swedish. He is the author of acclaimed biographies of Hugh Kingsmill, Lytton Strachey, and Augustus John. (The film Carrington, directed by Christopher Hampton, was based on his Lytton Strachey, and a film based on Augustus John is in preparation.) His four-     volume biography of Shaw was originally published between 1988 and 1992, after fifteen years of research and writing. Holroyd was awarded the CBE in 1989. He lives in London and Somerset and is married to the writer Margaret Drabble.