Lenin described George Bernard Shaw as a good man fallen among Fabians. None, indeed, of all the various paths to socialism could be less like the Bolshevik one than that of the Fabian Society which was founded by a group of high-minded middle class intellectuals140 years ago. Not for the Fabians the Bolshevik road of conspiracy, confrontation and violent revolution; their chosen model was instead that of the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus Cunctator, who earned the last part of his name by his delaying tactics in the second Punic war which wore down Hannibal’s army while giving his own forces time to recover their strength and take the offensive.

The original aim of the founding Fabian fathers (the bestknown being Sidney Webb and George Bernard Shaw) was to establish democratic socialism in Britain by permeating the Liberal and Conservative parties with socialist ideas. When this early form of entryism did not work, they hitched their wagon to the star of the newly formed Labour Party. In the stained-glass window that Shaw commissioned for the Fabians, the Society was more threateningly shown as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. When HG Wells quarreled with the Fabian old guard (mainly Shaw and Webbs) he used yet another animal metaphor.

He said the Fabians had permeated English society with their socialist ideas about as much as a mouse may be said to permeate a cat. No one has been able to discover quite what the quarrel between the old guard and Wells was all about, but everybody concerned got tremendously hot under the collar, and the upshot was that Wells was crushed by Shaw’s vastly superior rhetorical skills. GDH Cole was yet another who quarreled violently with the old guard resigning from the society no fewer than four times. Such flaming rows were hardly surprising since the Fabians always consisted of people with markedly different personalities and policies. Some of them were extremely puritanical.

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The 1890 annual meeting was firmly instructed that it “must not conclude with a dance”, that there would be “no ices” and cigarettes only after 6 pm. Rebecca West wrote of the dullness of most of the members and noted that they suffered from a malady of the spirit. Norman and Jean Mackenzie, historians of the........

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