Kingsley Martin on George Bernard Shaw

“Desmond MacCarthy, whom I tried to persuade to write a new appreciation of Shaw in old age, noticed a real deterioration in Shaw himself. The Shaw who had praised Mussolini and justified Hitler grew increasingly irresponsible in suggesting that people who were a nuisance should be killed. This strain in Shaw, and his characteristic inconsistency when he dropped back suddenly into individualism, after maintaining the State's right to liquidate anyone it disapproved of, had been growing steadily stronger from Major Barbara onwards. He ceased to have a genuine humanism such as he had shown in the splendid preface to John Bull's Other Island. In general, re-reading Shaw, MacCarthy said he could find nothing but "a chaos of clear ideas".”

“He understood early the weakness of democracy; he was naturally impatient with the shallow humbug of much political talk. There was so much in it to laugh at, and so much to expose, that he even allowed himself to praise Mussolini and Hitler and to excuse all the darker deeds of Stalin. In 1948 he sent me a letter describing Russia as a democracy in which Stalin would be pushed out of power in ten minutes if he offended the majority of the Communist Party.”