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“... audiences as generations of clever, calculatedly bumptious undergraduates, from Mackworth Praed to Kenneth Tynan, have performed to their alma maters at Oxford and Cambridge. With the same energy that he gave to his belated education, he flung himself into the other activities that young men discover at university. On his 29th birthday he was introduced ...”

“... short. And he applies the same technique to people who upset his puritanical sense of propriety. Kenneth Tynan is described in this book as ‘theatre critic and impresario of the pornographic revue, Oh, Calcutta’. Ingrams is proud of being first to ‘break’ the story of Lady Falkender’s illegitimate children. It would seem that Goldsmith does ...”

“... came in 1955, and The Good Person of Szechwan was staged at the Royal Court the following year. Kenneth Tynan announced that Brecht was ‘this generation’s pathfinder’. At home, however, he and his productions were relentlessly attacked for decadence and formalism. He fought constant battles with the Party bureaucracy over censorship and political ...”

“... made the mistake of trying to balance him by appointing alongside him the epitome of 1960s chic, Kenneth Tynan – who then tried to get rid of his Tory boss by staging plays calculated to offend him. First came Rolf Hochhuth’s Soldiers, which cast Churchill as a war criminal. When that didn’t see Chandos off, he put on Conor Cruise O’Brien’s ...”

“... one of the slain, in a cemetery overlooking the town. None of it happened as Capote wished it had. Kenneth Tynan pinned a wriggling Capote to the wall on this delicate point of ethics and In Cold Blood. ‘We are talking,’ Tynan wrote, ‘about responsibility. For the first time an influential writer in the front rank ...”

“... on endless rewriting. It was a clash of dragons. When finally staged, the play was hailed by Kenneth Tynan as the finest artificial comedy by an English pen since Congreve, though he felt it might be the end of an era: and so it was, for the next time round there were complaints about ‘mandarin old bags’ spilling pseudo-epigrams. Other ...”

“... The Confidential Clerk (1954) and The Elder Statesman (1959), were praised as skilful, though Kenneth Tynan ventured to call the latter play ‘banal’. Hugh Kenner complained that the characters in them speak English English, rather than American English, though why he expected otherwise of a writer who had been listening to English talk for half a ...”

“... pretentiousRenata Adler – crackpotSusan Sontag – nobodyNora Ephron – liarOther hand:Kenneth Tynan – creepTruman Capote – leechGeorge Plimpton – slickTom Wolfe – talentlessPhilip Roth – jerkIt was a mercy she only had two hands. To be fair, there were some men she liked. They tended to be showbusiness people. She liked Robin ...”

“... to service a Morris Minor. ‘Valentino taught me the importance of narcissism,’ he told Ken Tynan in a BBC interview in 1967. (He evidently studied film actors: his trick of rolling dead eyes upward till the whites showed came from Fritz Kortner.) He worked hard on himself, and the work paid off in matinee idol parts: Beau Geste, Bothwell in a thing ...”

“... becoming part of the talentocracy he was drawn to. Laurence Olivier commissioned him (along with Kenneth Tynan) to write a musical on nuclear war; the Spectator appointed him film critic, and his friend David Astor got him permanent residence and made him a regular reporter on the Observer. Lessing and Sigal inspired and tormented each other in equal ...”

“... was an immediate if controversial hit. Some avant-garde and progressive voices championed it – Kenneth Tynan, Marxism Today – but there was plenty of criticism too. T.C. Worsley, theatre critic for the New Statesman, thought Delaney’s success merely reflected the fashion for working-class voices; Salford’s city fathers complained that she was ...”

“... impersonate the novelist. The audience gradually got the joke as Corey, who was once described by Kenneth Tynan as a ‘travesty of all that our civilisation holds dear and one of the funniest grotesques in America’, accepted the ‘stipend’ on behalf of ‘Richard Python’. ‘The great fiction story is now being rehearsed before our very eyes, in ...”

“... rustics eating crustless Ruskets’; the strip cartoon by Jules Feiffer; the witty reviews by Kenneth Tynan of plays that we had next to no chance of seeing; the house adverts by the subversive estate agent Roy Brooks that my brother read aloud (‘The décor is revolting … rain drips sadly onto the oilcloth … sacrifice £3500’). As Jeremy ...”

“... Bloomsbury have sent out the first publicity pack for Kenneth Tynan’s diaries, edited by John Lahr, which are to be published in October. Among the slogans (‘Think Alan Clark meets Alan Bennett’ – no, don’t) and the paraphernalia (a padlock and key) is a pamphlet of highlights. A good many of the selected entries concern spanking, and a good many others are anecdotes about Hemingway, Dietrich, Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Miles Davis, Gregory Peck, but it’s not all like that ...”

“... with what has been logged as ‘the most complained about event in the history of the BBC’: not Kenneth Tynan saying ‘fuck’ on air, or a programme giving equal time to an alleged IRA commander and a loyalist hardliner, or even the proposal to alter the timing of the shipping forecast, but the blanket coverage given to the death of Prince Philip in ...”