Horace Walpole claimed that the world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel. The story of George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells could be aptly summed up in this dichotomy: Shaw was the thinking man par excellence, whose emotional detachment made him seem diabolically cold-blooded to many of his contemporaries, including Wells, while Wells was a man who hardly knew the meaning of the word “detachment”; his intellect, impressive though it was, could always be overruled by his intense emotions.

They both used their considerable supplies of charm to conceal the extent of their mutual hostility from their public, each other, and even themselves.

The two men met at the disastrous première of Henry James’s play Guy Domville, in January 1895. Shaw, thirty-eight years old, was one of London’s foremost critics as well as a well-known playwright. Wells, ten years younger, was relatively unknown, but he was poised for an imminent flight to superstardom: The Time Machine would appear in May of that year.

That evening saw the beginning of a fifty-year association between the two men that for want of a better word has been called a friendship, though the protagonists’ characters were so opposed, their egos so voracious, that they could as easily be considered enemies as friends. They both used their considerable