« He Watches Hardball So That You Don't Have To | Main | Your Daily Pointless Flash Thingy »

Pshaw! Pshaw! Pshaw!

Today is the 150th anniversary of the birth (July 26, 1856) of George Bernard Shaw. By coincidence, I was going through some notes and I came across this rememberance of him by Bertrand Russell. I'd been unsuccessfully looking for it on the Internet for years. It seems to sum up the old fool nicely:

He wanted to be witty at all costs and it led him into unbelievable cruelties. He taunted [H.G.] Wells with facetious remarks about his wife -- Wells's wife -- when he knew very well she was dying of cancer.

Alistair Cooke, Six Men, p. 166, Knoph, 1977

(The title of the post comes from an anecdote in Richard Ellmann's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Oscar Wilde. One day Wilde ran into GBS. Shaw said that he was thinking of starting a new magazine. Wilde asked him what it would be called, to which he replied, "Shaw! Shaw! Shaw!"

"Oh. And how will you spell it?")

About

This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on July 26, 2006 10:48 PM.

The previous post in this blog was He Watches Hardball So That You Don't Have To.

The next post in this blog is Your Daily Pointless Flash Thingy.

Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.

Powered by
Movable Type 3.33
Site Meter