1. Laura Miller in Salon (July 3)
“It requires the ego of a George Bernard Shaw to write of Shakespeare, in the Saturday Review, as ‘this “immortal”’ pilferer of other men’s stories and ideas, with his monstrous rhetorical fustian, his unbearable platitudes, his pretentious reduction of the subtlest problems of life to commonplaces against which a Polytechnic debating club would revolt, his incredible unsuggestiveness, his sententious combination of ready reflection with complete intellectual sterility, and his consequent incapacity for getting out of the depth of even the most ignorant audience, except when he solemnly says something so transcendentally platitudinous that his more humble-minded hearers cannot bring themselves to believe that so great a man really meant to talk like their grandmothers.”
2. From Life is Meals, by James and Kay Salter
July 26, 1885. On this day George Bernard Shaw celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday by losing his virginity to a widow fifteen years older. Some time later, at a formal dinner in London at which, according to custom, the host invited guests to make a toast on particular topics, Shaw was asked for one on sex. He stood, raised his glass, and began, “It gives me great pleasure…” and took his seat.
Laura Miller needs more full stops. And probably many other things.
Ah! The moral superiority of the pompous vegetarian.