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“... and, on the first Aldermaston march, ‘walked with Doirs Lessing, Christopher Logue and Kenneth Tynan’. Twice he was arrested and Vicky drew him as a convict in broad arrows. The year 1968 found him with the insurgents in the Sorbonne, but in Britain ‘few shared my enthusiasm for the students of Paris.’ In many ways he was a glutton for ...”

“... plays work, and which defines his art in relation to those who preceded and followed him. In 1977, Kenneth Tynan claimed that The Young Idea (written in 1921, and sadly not republished this year) ‘contains the first line that distinguished Coward from all his predecessors in English comedy: “I lent that woman the top of my thermos flask and she never ...”

“... In a lovely 1963 piece on Miles Davis, Kenneth Tynan quoted Cocteau to illuminate the art of his ‘discreet, elliptical’ subject: Davis was one of those 20th-century artists who had found ‘a simple way of saying very complicated things’. Jump to 1966 and the meatier, beatier sound of a UK Top 20 hit, the Who’s ‘Substitute’, a vexed, stuttering anti-manifesto, with its self-accusatory boast: ‘The simple things you see are all complicated!’ You couldn’t find two more different musical cries: Davis’s liquid tone is hurt, steely, recessive, where Townshend’s is upfront, impatient, hectoring ...”

“... the desire for a smash hit’; ‘Coward remained essentially childish throughout his life.’ Kenneth Tynan confirmed that Coward ‘never suffered the imprisonment of maturity’. Mature years, however, brought on a reactionary rage, not only against the follies of the past but against the excesses of the Sixties. Resolute not to ‘come ...”

“... Tibet is nowhere. It is easy to tell the issues about which MacArthur felt keenly in his youth; Kenneth Tynan writing about Look back in Anger, for example, touches a memory of angry young manhood. MacArthur writes of his parents having to leave school at 14: his was ‘the first generation to go to redbrick universities, only to be dismissed as scum ...”

“... The reaction started with the publication of Death in the Afternoon in 1932, the hero of which, as Kenneth Lynn cogently expresses it, is not ‘a haunted Nick Adams, or a crippled Jake Barnes, or a hollowed-out Frederic Henry, but an overbearing know-it-all named Ernest Hemingway’. Max Eastman said Hemingway had false hair on his chest. Gertrude Stein, in ...”

“... Snowdons was ‘like being in the Garden of Eden without seeing God’. Marlon Brando persuaded Kenneth Tynan to ask her to dinner à trois and then was so tongue-tied that he couldn’t address a word to her except through Tynan: ‘Would you ask the princess what she thinks of …’ ...”

“... and Isherwood’ (Alan Brien), ‘The most glitteringly funny prose since Evelyn Waugh’ (Kenneth Tynan). The English Way of Doing Things does not live up to these tributes. The farcical plot evidently attempts a dirtied-up Wodehouse style, of the kind successfully carried off by Tom Sharpe; the prose style of the opening chapter may be an ...”

“... of entertainment to have been written in modern times, comparable in its passion and panache to Kenneth Tynan’s theatre reviews in the post-war period, but without the golly-goshery that mars Tynan’s work. It seems likely to last as long as anyone cares about words rising to the challenge of such images. One of ...”

“... killed. Here too she met the man who became her second husband and gave Tomáš a new name: Major Kenneth Stoppard, a reliable provider, a xenophobe and antisemite, who towards the end of his life suggested his stepson stop using his surname. ‘Sorry Dad,’ was the reply. ‘It’s not practical.’ The new family left for England in 1946. Large numbers of ...”

“... I have a dream in which I join a subversive organisation called the Socialist Lavatory League,’ Kenneth Tynan wrote in his diary in 1973. ‘Its purpose is to bring all private loos into public ownership. Everyone will have the right to use anyone else’s loo – which will mean the end of private peeing. The dream wakes me up giggling, but on ...”

“... to Naples, he heard her bawling: ‘Steward, where’s my shaving water?’ Eventually he and Kenneth Tynan collaborated on a surrealistic radio play, The Quest for Corbett, and persuaded her – though at first she said ‘she didn’t understand a bloody word of this “avant-garde tripe”’ – to star in it. According to Bailey, she did not ...”

“... murderous teenagers of Heavenly Creatures as ‘the most hideous man alive’, matches wits with Kenneth Tynan and Laurence Olivier in Austin Pendleton’s play Orson’s Shadow, and has even been fingered posthumously as a suspect in the 1947 Black Dahlia murder. Welles appears, larger than life, in documentaries and dramatisations, of both his own ...”

“... the war he was given the part of Slightly, one of the Lost Boys in Peter Pan. Forty years later, Kenneth Tynan wrote of him that ‘in 1913 he was Slightly in Peter Pan, and you might say that he has been wholly in Peter Pan ever since.’ It was not exactly an insult and it had an element of truth. Soden makes something, perhaps rather too much, of the ...”

“... conversation. One laughs in recognition, but one’s laughter is tinged with snobbism.’ This is Kenneth Tynan in 1960, quoted by Billington. One’s laughter might be tinged with many things, and vague, repetitive silliness can hardly be confined to one class. But there is no silliness in Pinter’s dialogue, and no real inconsequentiality ...”