Reviewed in Brief

As Shaw’s neighbor at Ayot St. Lawrence, Mr. Winsten has made a good living out of the master. This is his fifth book on the subject, not counting prefaces. Mostly anecdotal, it nevertheless covers Shaw’s entire lifetime and reproduces some good photographs. But it will do nothing to alter the image of Shaw which he himself spent nearly a century setting up: of a man for whom emotional as well as bodily self-preservation was an absolute vocation.

Five short biographies of lesser known Tudors, from Walsingham, inventor of the secret service, to Mary Frith who organized London’s pickpockets. What originally attracted Mr. Meadows to the Elizabethans was their phenomenal energy. “From our worried fifties of the 20th century,” he says, “we look back on the first Elizabethans and marvel.” And speaking as a Briton, he adds that “the modern American is the [sic] spiritual heir of the Elizabethans This is certainly a pleasant change from the usual anti-Americanism that glowers at us from across the Atlantic, but, on the other hand, and at the risk of impolitely looking a gift horse in the mouth, exactly where would some concrete evidence of this spiritual inheritance be found? In Ed Murrow? In Elvis Presley? In Ike Eisenhower?

RB

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Roger Becket

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As Shaw’s neighbor at Ayot St. Lawrence, Mr. Winsten has made a good living out of the master. This is his fifth book on the subject, not counting prefaces. Mostly anecdotal, it nevertheless covers Shaw’s entire lifetime and reproduces some good photographs. But it will do nothing to alter the image of Shaw which he himself spent nearly a century setting up: of a man for whom emotional as well as bodily self-preservation was an absolute vocation.

Five short biographies of lesser known Tudors, from Walsingham, inventor of the secret service, to Mary Frith who organized London’s pickpockets. What originally attracted Mr. Meadows to the Elizabethans was their phenomenal energy. “From our worried fifties of the 20th century,” he says, “we look back on the first Elizabethans and marvel.” And speaking as a Briton, he adds that “the modern American is the [sic] spiritual heir of the Elizabethans This is certainly a pleasant change from the usual anti-Americanism that glowers at us from across the Atlantic, but, on the other hand, and at the risk of impolitely looking a gift horse in the mouth, exactly where would some concrete evidence of this spiritual inheritance be found? In Ed Murrow? In Elvis Presley? In Ike Eisenhower?