The many people and institutions that helped me to prepare the original four volumes of my Shaw biography are comprehensively listed in those volumes, and I take this opportunity to renew my thanks to them all. I have continued reading The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies in the United States and The Shavian in Britain, as well as new publications about G.B.S. and his contemporaries, and to keep an eye out for Shaw manuscript material coming up at auction, so as to make necessary adjustments to my text in this abridgement. I owe special thanks to Sarah Johnson who transcribed my increasingly illegible marginalia on to immaculate discs; to my editor Alison Samuel who has continued walking in my steps and issuing corrections when I put a foot wrong; and to Howard Davies who queried anything queryable in this revised narrative.
MICHAEL HOLROYD
Porlock Weir, December 1996