Word: bentley
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...into his little laboratory in University College, London. He tore up some documents and opened the petcock of a single Bunsen burner. It was enough for his final experiment. At week's end in St. Pancras court, where Sir Bernard had often given expert medical testimony, Coroner W. Bentley Purchase returned "with reluctance" a verdict of suicide...
BERNARD SHAW (242 pp.)-Eric Bentley -New Directions...
Pose of Arrogance. Worshipful Critic Eric Bentley, who has tried to truss Shavian doctrine into a system of thought, is one of the few who still pay unflagging homage to Shaw's ideas. For him Shaw is not merely a brilliant playwright who handled the English language with a clarity and wit unrivaled since Swift; Shaw is also a profound thinker whose "pose of arrogance was a deliberate strategy in an utterly altruistic struggle" to irritate men into thought. But the "utterly altruistic struggle" failed, and there was Shaw's tragedy: he, the court jester, was idolized...
...which facts was the Englishman-or anyone else-to face? Here is where Shavian Bentley has his troubles...
Homemade Fancies. Once there is added to these bewildering inconsistencies Shaw's homemade fads & fancies-his plumping for "eugenic breeding'' (which Bentley, with restraint born of love, euphemizes into "idealistic racism"), antivivisectionism, vegetarianism, the Bergsonian "Life Force"-the Shavian mind begins to look like a railroad baggage room, full of handsome luggage and old egg crates...