George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856, the youngest child of a genteel but impoverished Protestant household: his father drank, and his mother, a gifted singer, eventually followed her voice teacher to London. Shaw loathed school and left at fifteen to clerk for a firm of land agents. In 1876 he too moved to London, where he never again lived in Ireland. He educated himself in the British Museum Reading Room, wrote a string of novels that found few readers, and made his name instead as a music and theatre critic.

A political awakening led him into the Fabian Society, whose most prominent pamphleteer he became, and the example of Ibsen convinced him that the stage could carry ideas. His first public success, Arms and the Man (1894), was followed by a long run of plays — Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Pygmalion, Heartbreak House — that used paradox, wit and unflagging argument to attack the pieties of class, money, marriage, religion and war. Saint Joan (1923), his tragic chronicle of Joan of Arc, crowned his reputation.

Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize for 1925, conferred the following year. In 1938 he won an Academy Award for the screenplay of Pygmalion, becoming the first person to hold both honours. His opinions remained contentious — he championed eugenics and spelling reform, opposed vaccination, and praised both Mussolini and Stalin — and he declined state honours, including the Order of Merit. He wrote almost to the end, dying at Ayot St Lawrence in 1950, aged ninety-four; the word “Shavian” preserves his manner.