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 ofBernard 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 ofBernard Shaw as Artist-FabianPeople known to Bernard Shaw had every reason to fear becoming recognizable characters in his plays. He turned Beatrice Webb into a witchlike virago inThe Millionairess, Winston Churchill into an aspiring, blowhard politician inJohn Bull's Other Island, and Lawrence of Arabia into the eccentric army private Napoleon Alexander Trotsky Meek inToo True to Be Good.However, as eminent Shaw scholar Stanley Weintraub reveals in this exquisite collection, 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, andBenjamin 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."