Whimsies of the Sex Wars YOU NEVER CAN TELL

YOU NEVER CAN TELL by George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw tends to be remembered these days as something of a gasbag, capable of writing wry ironies and stately pronouncements but also prone to debating straw men on matters that may once have been passionately topical but now have faded into quaintness. Indeed, Shaw should serve as a warning to play-wrights of the pitfalls of political relevance; by the end of his long life he had seen social change transmute his radical socialism into dusty avuncularity. He is now most celebrated as a mainstream practitioner of the very drawing-room-comedy formulas that he tried to subvert toward hortatory ends. The...

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