Seán O’Faoláin is the embodiment in twentieth-century Irish cultural life of a version of the European public intellectual. A commentator on Irish and world affairs, he responded frequently to the political directives of the mid-century decades, pushing against the pressures towards insularity and clerical nationalism and recruiting literary culture to his cause. Co-founder of the influential journal The Bell, he was also a journalist and essayist, the author of fiction, several major biographies, travel writer and literary critic. Across this eclectic oeuvre O’Faoláin advanced his sense of a world in which the writer worked to maintain connections with English and Continental culture, claiming for Ireland a European position. In the 1940s his voice was perhaps at its most impressive and diverse, culminating in the publication in 1947 of The Irish: A Character Study, his vibrant diagnosis of the emerging nation. This chapter reassesses O’Faoláin’s role as a European public intellectual in a time of global crisis, drawing new comparisons between O’Faoláin and a diverse array of contemporary commentators including Jean-Paul Sartre, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt.

Unlike for some writers of the modern period, scholars need not be defensive about reading Bernard Shaw in context, nor suggest that doing so presents a radical departure in scholarship. As countless studies and biographies of Shaw attest, he is the consummate subject to be read in context. His writing was not only informed by many of the popular modes, genres, and trends of his day – from melodrama and farce to the New Drama, from the Victorian novel to the New Journalism – but also bent them into idiosyncratic forms. ‘Make It New!’ commanded Ezra Pound. But Pound was coming rather late to the party: Shaw and his colleagues had already been making it new for decades.

From the time in 1876 that he quit the provincial backwater that was his native Dublin for the lures of London – the capital of the all-powerful British Empire enjoying perhaps its most dynamic century – Shaw sought to be in the thick of things and of the moment in which he lived. He first made his name as a reviewer of art, music, and theatre, using his columns not merely to comment on culture and society, but to mould public tastes and to forge his identity. In tandem, he circulated in almost every fashionable, avant-garde, and radical organisation, movement, and body of thought there was, from the Fabian Society to the Stage Society, from vegetarianism and evolutionary theory to feminism and continental philosophy. Not happy to take a back or passenger seat to history, he often imposed himself in many of these arenas, becoming a key player by lecturing and pamphleteering on their behalves and, almost inevitably, coming into conflict with many like-minded individuals and friends.

In addition to his perennial writing and lecturing, Shaw held public office as a vestryman and councillor in the Borough of St Pancras from 1897 to 1903 and was active on a wide range of policies that would affect the lives of his fellow citizens. In his travels, socialising, political work, and writing, he enjoyed relationships with luminaries in several fields and attracted the admiration of individuals who would transform the world in significant ways: Albert Einstein, W. B. Yeats, Bertolt Brecht, Oscar Wilde, Gene Tunney, Auguste Rodin, Charlie Chaplin, Emmeline Pankhurst, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin, and Jawaharlal Nehru, to name a small but revealing sampling.

Censorship was a constant threat throughout Bernard Shaw's long career. Even in liberal democracies, works now recognised as modern classics were bowdlerised and banned; publishers and writers were prosecuted in trials; theatres were picketed and raided; and books were withdrawn from shelves and burned in the streets by moral activists, librarians, and booksellers if they happened to go undetected by customs and police officers. In Britain, repression was felt most strongly in the theatre, which resulted in the stage's intellectually impoverished state towards the end of the nineteenth century.

This had not always been the case: until the early eighteenth century, the theatre had drawn most of Britain's top literary talents. However, when Henry Fielding staged a relentless string of popular plays satirising government corruption, Sir Robert Walpole's government passed the Licensing Act of 1737. Thereafter, theatre managers were required to submit scripts to the Lord Chamberlain for approval, causing serious writers to flock to the nascent genre of the novel. While the initial intent of theatre censorship had been to curtail political critique, over time successive changes in personnel led to wide and varying interpretations of what was deemed appropriate for the stage. As a result, plays were cut or rejected because of their treatment of politics, or their depictions of nationality, crime, professions, sexuality, religion, race, and class. Yet the authorities deliberately banned plays not only to prevent them from being performed but also to discourage other authors from taking up their pens.

By the late-Victorian period, the stifling of the stage had frustrated the intelligentsia and cultural élite enough that a broad resistance coalesced, with Shaw playing a prominent role. Three productions in particular became defining moments of the era. The first of these occurred in 1886, when the Shelley Society, with Shaw serving as press officer, organised a members-only performance of P. B. Shelley's banned horror-incest play The Cenci (1819). Such private performances became the tactic of choice for those seeking to circumvent the law as they were outside the Lord Chamberlain's control. The Independent Theatre Society followed in these lines in 1891 with Ibsen's Ghosts (1881), which had been banned for its portrayal of incest and venereal disease.