George Bernard Shaw was born on this date in 1856. 10 things you might not know about him:
He didn’t like the name George and preferred to be known as Bernard Shaw.
He hated school and left at 15 to become a junior clerk in a Dublin estate agency at a salary of £18 a year. He later described the work as a “damnable waste of human life”.
For a time he was a Music critic and wrote under the pen-name Corno di Bassetto.
He grew a Beard to hide a smallpox scar on his face. All the same, he was an anti-vaxxer and described vaccination as "a peculiarly filthy piece of witchcraft". He believed that improving social housing would be a much more effective means of eradicating smallpox than vaccinating people.
He didn’t lose his virginity until he was 29. On his 29th birthday he started an affair with Jane (Jenny) Patterson, a widow some years his senior.
He didn’t marry until he was 41, and possibly then only because his wife, Charlotte, moved in with him to nurse him through a bout of ill health. She had proposed marriage to him before, but he’d turned her down. However, if they were going to be living together, he thought they should marry to avoid scandal. They lived together happily enough although there’s speculation that the marriage was never consummated.
He’s one of only two people to win a Nobel Prize and an Oscar. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1925 and at first declined it; but later accepted the award but not the prize money. He won the Oscar in 1939 for Best Screenplay for his role in adapting his own play Pygmalion for the screen. The other person to have won both awards is Bob Dylan who won an Oscar in 2001 for Best Original Song - Things have Changed featured in the film The Wonder Boys, and the Nobel prize for Literature in 2016.
Shaw had a special writing hut built in his garden which had a mechanism by which he could rotate it in order to get the best of the light throughout the day.
He tried to reform the English alphabet in order to combat inconsistencies in English spelling and make it easier for poor people to learn to read. In his will he established two ‘Alphabet Trusts’ to fund the creation of an entirely new 40-letter phonetic alphabet.
He enjoyed gardening right up until he was in his 90s but it proved to be the death of him in the end. At 94, he climbed a ladder to prune a tree, fell off, and died of Kidney failure as a result of the fall.
The first in a new series! It has invading aliens, gladiator-style contests, rivalry and romance.
The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.
Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.
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