Captain Brassbound's conversion; by George Bernard Shaw.

For a long time this was a very favourite play and that merely means when you have lived so much more and read as well, other works add to the favourite lists.

It is an amazing play, beginning with what might be - or should be - a common fear in minds of all colonial masters traveling in parts they misruled once; a bandit capturing and kidnapping a small party of travellers and promising to sell the lord of the group to a dreaded ruler for beheading after a few games.

And from this dreadful start, it then proceeds into a delightful play, with one pompous man (the ex colonial ruler sort, naturally) brought down by one of his own party - his sister-in-law, and the bandit outsmarted by her kind ans sympathetic but shrewd dealing iwth the situation, so he comes out looking like a hero who saved them, in fact.

One of the lines - "it becomes clear that an agitated man pacing furiously cannot win against a woman knitting calmly" - of course this is as I remember it after the few decades it has been since I read it yet again for pleasure. He wrote it much better, of course.