George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856, and moved to London to join his mother in 1877. He wrote reviews for the press while working on his books and plays, and married the Anglo-Irish Charlotte Payne-Townsend in 1898.

He is best known for his plays which include Arms and the Man, Mrs Warren's Profession, The Philanderer, Man and Superman, Heartbreak House, St. Joan, Pygmalion and John Bull's Other Island. Established as London's leading wit and dramatist in the late Edwardian period, he moved to rural Hertfordshire in 1906, and lived there until his death in 1950.

He courted controversy, criticising the conduct of the First World War and speaking in defence of the Easter Rising in 1916 and of Sir Roger Casement, who was executed for treason. In his plays, he was not afraid to tackle serious issues such as war, religion and prostitution, and in 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Shaw was an international figure with socialist views, and resisted narrow classification. Between 1897 and 1903 he was a local councillor in the borough of St. Pancras.

Invited to join London's Irish Club after the Second World War, he is said to have replied, "I can imagine nothing less desirable than an Irish Club. Irish people in England should avoid each other like the plague. If they flock together like geese they might as well have never left Ireland".