Frank Hugh O’Donnell was an Irish politician and journalist, known as a fierce opponent of British imperialism and the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland. He was born Francis Hugh MacDonald at a barracks in Devon to a sergeant in the British Army. He was educated in Galway at a Jesuit high school and then at Queen’s College, where he rapidly earned a reputation as an orator and controversialist.

In 1874 he was elected Member of Parliament for Galway but, in a judgment probably influenced by political bias, was convicted of electoral malpractice and removed from office. Undeterred, he returned to the Commons three years later as Member for Dungarvan, Co. Waterford, and held that seat until its abolition in 1885. A provocative and popular figure within the Home Rule League, he served the party with champion filibustering and in 1888 he launched the historic libel action against The Times which led to C. S. Parnell’s exoneration from conspiracy in the Phoenix Park Murders.

In Parliament he often spoke on British imperialism in India in analogy with Irish matters. He received a schooling in Indian nationalism from his friend G. M. Tagore, with whom he, J.C. Meenakshya and four other Irish MPs joined in 1875 to form the Constitutional Society of India. Further information was gleaned from his brother Charles J. O’Donnell, an civil servant in Bihar who earned the nickname ‘the enfant terrible of the ICS’ for his public criticism and exposure of government policy. In 1882 he told Parliament that the Irish Party were ‘the natural representatives and spokesmen for the unrepresented nationalities of the empire’ and in 1883 he threw his weight behind a premature campaign to have Dadabhai Naoroji elected to Parliament. In 1905 he sent a message of support to Shyamji Krishnavarma upon his inauguration of India House.

Defeated by Parnell in his bid for the party leadership, O'Donnell abandoned parliamentary politics and, after joining the Irish Republican Brotherhood (Fenians), pursued a chequered career of furious pamphleteering. During the Boer War he secured funds from the Transvaal Government to militate against Irish enlistment, but he was later accused of pocketing the money and condemned by the United Irishman. He spent much of his later career campaigning for secular and mixed education in a series of determined sallies against the political might of the Catholic clergy. He died unmarried at London, and is buried at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.

Alfred Webb was an Irish nationalist. He was elected MP for West Waterford in 1890 for the Irish Parliamentary Party. Waterford West was a UK parliamentary constituency for Ireland from 1885 to 1918. Webb was elected again in 1892 on an anti-Parnell ticket. He became a member of the Indian parliamentary party set up by William Wedderburn following the election of Dadabhai Naoroji.

Webb resigned from Parliament in 1895 but remained involved in Irish and Indian nationalist politics. During a visit to India in 1898 he was elected President of the Indian National Congress.

Mehdi Hasan Khan was a Hyderabadi Civil Servant of Lucknow Origin. Born in around 1852, he met and married Ellen Gertrude Donnelly, the daughter of the Irish Resident of Lucknow. In 1883, he got a job in Hyderabad and became Chief Justice in 1886. In 1887 he was given the title Fath Nawaz Jung by the Nizam.

In 1888 he was deputed by the Nizam to travel to London regarding a case involving the Hyderabad (Deccan) Mining Company. During his time in Britain, Khan wrote a diary of observations. This was first partly published in a few edited extracts by Mary Hobhouse in the Indian Magazine in 1890. It was then also published for private circulation in 1890.

Associated with Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Aligarh College, Khan arrived in England with introductions to relatives and colleagues of English officials. He was received in London by Theodore Beck's sister and invited to a 'drawing room' held by Queen Victoria in Buckingham Palace on 9 May 1888. The diaries deal with his visits to various landmarks and towns in England, the people he met and also provide some social commentary on British life.

George Bernard Shaw was an Anglo-Irish playwright and political activist. Born and schooled in Dublin, he came to England in 1876. He educated himself by reading in the British Museum, and started his writing career as a music and literary critic for several periodicals. After unsuccessful attempts at novel writing, Shaw turned to drama. He wrote over sixty plays in the course of his life, including Man and Superman (1903), Pygmalion (1912; posthumously adapted as a musical ‘My Fair Lady’) and Saint Joan (1923). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.

Shaw, inspired by Henry George’s work, became a committed socialist in the 1880s. In 1884, he joined the newly formed Fabian Society, and gave lectures and wrote articles to further its causes. Shaw was also a vegetarian, and supported Henry Salt’s Humanitarian League and its commitment to animal rights. During the First World War, he indefatigably campaigned for international peace and negotiation.

Shaw was an outspoken supporter of the Indian independence movement and a great admirer of Mahatma Gandhi, whom he met in 1931 in London. Gandhi was also an admirer of Shaw’s works. Shaw visited India in 1933, but the two could not meet as Gandhi was imprisoned at the time. Shaw also met Rabindranath Tagore in London in May 1913. Two of Shaw’s close female friends later went to India and devoted themselves to Indian causes: Annie Besant and the actress Florence Farr. Shaw met Besant in 1885; she asked him to introduce her to the Fabian Society, and serialized Shaw’s novels The Irrational Knot and Love among Artists in her magazine Our Corner. The actress Florence Farr was at one time Shaw’s mistress, and Shaw frequently met W. B. Yeats at Farr’s home in London. In 1937, Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism was reissued by Krishna Menon’s Pelican Books, inaugurating Penguin’s paperback list.

Louis Frederick MacNeice was born in Belfast to John Frederick MacNeice and Elizabeth Margaret MacNeice. He was sent to preparatory school in Sherbourne, England, in 1917, then attended Marlborough College in 1921 and Merton College, Oxford, in 1926. At Oxford, he met writers W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender. In 1930, his final year at Oxford, he was awarded a first in literae humaniores, edited Oxford Poetry with Stephen Spender, and published his first book of poetry, Blind Fireworks.

He entered the literary circle of London, where he met Bonamy Dobrée, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Cecil Day Lewis and Mulk Raj Anand. He describes his first meeting with Anand thus: 'It was outside the British Museum that I met Mulk Raj Anand, a young Indian novelist. Mulk was small and lithe and very handsome, wore shirts, ties and scarves of scarlet or coral, talked very fast and all the time, was a crusader for the Indian Left' (The Strings Are False, p. 209). By 1940, war had broken out in Europe and MacNeice decided to leave for the United States where he remained until December that year. He was not fit for war service but joined the BBC in 1941. In wartime London, MacNeice still socialized with many of his literary friends from the 1930s: Cecil Day Lewis, Mulk Raj Anand and M. J. Tambimuttu. MacNeice also published many of his poems in Tambimuttu's journal Poetry London and was included in Tambimuttu's Poetry in Wartime (1942).

Upon Indian independence in 1947, MacNeice was sent to India to cover the event for the BBC. He and fellow companions, Francis Dillon and Wynford Vaughan Thomas, travelled through much of India and reported back to England on the celebrations as well as the horrors they witnessed.

In 1961, MacNeice gave up full-tme employment in the BBC to free up time for writing. In 1963, he became ill, and he died of viral pneumonia on 3 September.