'I can't help it being "Beauty and the Beast," ' wrote Sidney Webb to Beatrice Potter shortly before their marriage in 1892, ' - if only it is not a case of Titania and Bottom!' The courtship of this super-extraordinary pair - 'two active self-centred people, excessively devoted to the public cause,' as H.G. Wells characterised them in The New Machiavelli - was the oddest romance in the Fabian calendar and a triumph for Sidney's policy of gradualism.

LRB 25 October 1979 | PDF Download