Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin of Protestant stock, in 1856 and died at Ayot St Lawrence, Herts, in 1950. After a false start in nineteenth-century fashion as a novelist, he made a reputation as a journalist-eritic of he had plunged into the Socialist revival of the eighteen-eighties and emerged as one of the leaders who made the Fabian Society famous, figuring prominently not only as a pamphleteer and

platform orator, but as a serious economist and philosopher, and

pubishing major essays on Ibsen and Wagner. He broke out in a

new direction in 1892 as a playwright, although it was not until

Some twelve years later that the opposition he had always to face a

first was overcome sufficiently to establish him as an irresistible

force in the theatres.