Shaw

Carrying on the off-beat and far-ranging tradition of Shaw, this sixth volume opens with an account of the identification and naming of Pointe Bernard Shaw, a peninsula in northern Quebec, whose form viewed from the air resembles the famous Shaw profile, as shown in an accompanying photograph. Here also are a classic comparison of Shaw's activities during the First World War with those of Jonathan Swift during the years of the War of the Spanish Succession, exhibiting the belief of each that literary work should not exist in an aesthetic vacuum; a study of the enlargement of Shaw's intellectual world through his contacts with Albert Einstein; the discovery of the almost certain source of Jennifer Dubedat in Doctor's Dilemma in a strikingly attractive Australian widow; a moving account of the long friendship of Shaw and Laurence Housman, with Housman's drawing of Shaw; a speculation about the true mystery of Candida, celebrating as it does the birth of a poet's art; firsthand accounts by contemporary actresses such as Wendy Hiller, Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench, and Barbara Jefford on their experience of playing Shaw's St. Joan; and two previously unpublished scintillating Shaw pieces, one of these a futuristic fantasy that is a rare piece of Shavian prose fiction.