"Leading us through this amazing wealth of connections, allusions, relationships, and influences, Weintraub never falters in his lucid writing that captures the reader’s interest and fascination." --SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies

"This collection of essays by one of the world’s leading Shaw scholars makes original and significant contributions to understanding of Shaw on many different fronts…. A most welcome addition to a masterly collection of works about Shaw and his contemporaries by Weintraub, a collection characteristically marked, as here, by lively, punchy, and entertaining writing." --English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920

"Splendid. This book continually surprises and entertains with its revelations about Shaw's engagement with an impressive array of historical and contemporary figures, ranging from Jesus to Virginia Woolf. This is a virtuoso performance by a maestro of Shaw studies."--A. M. Gibbs, author of Bernard Shaw: A Life

"Ur-Shavian Stanley Weintraub's great virtues as a writer are stunning erudition and a consistently high level of readability. Again and again, his scholarship is illuminating--alive with original findings that make his essays profitable and exciting to read."--Charles A. Carpenter, author of Bernard Shaw as Artist-Fabian

Shaw's relationships to real or imagined personalities could be both curiously unexpected and deliciously complex. Featuring figures as varied as Julius Caesar, Zulu king Cetewayo, Noel Coward, Edward Elgar, and Benjamin Disraeli, this volume brilliantly demonstrates how Shaw put something of himself into all of his "people." The result is a book that is consistently revealing, intriguing, and entertaining.

Stanley Weintraub, Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University, is the author of over fifty books, including Private Shaw and Public Shaw, Journey to Heartbreak, Victoria: An Intimate Biography, and Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce.

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"Leading us through this amazing wealth of connections, allusions, relationships, and influences, Weintraub never falters in his lucid writing that captures the reader's interest and fascination."
--SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Sudies

"Makes original and significant contributions to understanding of Shaw on many different fronts…makes attractive additions to Weintraub's imaginatively chosen cast of people - from the pages of history and from among his contemporaries - with whom Shaw engaged."
--English Literature in Transition

"Weintraub excels at hearing intertextual echoes, often between major plays by Shaw and journeyman plays by otherwise major dramatists. No one is more qualified than Stanley Weintraub, who has written more than fifty books, many of them path-finding studies of Shaw, to give us a synthetic account of Shaw’s histories and historicisms."
--Modern Language Review

"With a ready wit and an indefatigable detective’s willingness to seek out the ways that people and places and books speak to each other, Weintraub traces the bits and pieces and personalities that Shaw borrowed from the life and times around him, as he often spun the straw of the mundane into gold…it is Weintraub's storytelling skill that teases and tells and witholds, and then ties it all up with a panache that cannot be duplicated."
--Text and Presentation