When I was a kid, I was taught by a kindly old Jesuit whose youth had been beguiled by George Bernard Shaw. The provocative ironies of ‘GBS’ were quoted everywhere and he was, for several decades, the world’s leading public intellectual. But as a schoolboy I found it hard to assent to the infatuations of my elders and though I relished Shaw’s aphorisms (‘we learn from history that we learn nothing from history’) I conceived a suspicion that he was smug and overrated.