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Plays Pleasant
Plays Pleasant
Oct 24, 2024 4:27 PM

Author:George Bernard Shaw,Dan Laurence

Plays Pleasant

One of Bernard Shaw’s most glittering comedies, Arms and the Man is a burlesque of Victorian attitudes to heroism, war and empire. In the contrast between Bluntschli, the mercenary soldier, and the brave leader, Sergius, the true nature of valour is revealed. Shaw mocks deluded idealism in Candida, when a young poet becomes infatuated with the wife of a Socialist preacher. The Man of Destiny is a witty war of words between Napoleon and a ‘strange lady’, while in the exuberant farce You Never Can Tell a divided family is reunited by chance. Although Shaw intended Plays Pleasant to be gentler comedies than those in their companion volume, Plays Unpleasant, their prophetic satire is sharp and provocative.

Reviews

'Excellently done...O'Farrell gives an extra squirm to the traditional English comedy of embarrassment'

—— The Sunday Times

Julianna Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart

—— Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize winning author of EMPIRE FALLS

An accomplished and charmingly messy tale of love and redemption

—— Kirkus Reviews

A novel of extraordinary range, yet of extraordinary minuteness, that manages never to sacrifice one quality for the other

—— Financial Times

Williams has fashioned an always engaging, psychologically convincing work of fiction - a consistent and well-realized portrait

—— New Yorker

A highly imaginative account of the life and times of Augustus-a brilliant novel

—— Library Journal

A brilliant epistolary novel about Octavius Caesar and ancient Rome...all three [of John Williams'] novels show a similar narrative arc: a young man's initiation, vicious male rivalries, subtler tensions between men and women, fathers and daughters, and finally a bleak sense of disappointment, even futility.

—— New York Times

Exquisite...brims with great lines

—— Chicago Tribune

A vividly imagined re-creation of classical Rome, but its intuitive grasp of the experience of immense power makes it an unusual, and superior, novel

—— Boston Globe

There could be no better year than 2014 to rediscover this one

—— Mary Beard , Times Literary Supplement
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