One of my unarguable postulates about aesthetics is that life mimics art, not art life.
—Kenneth Tynan, in He That Plays the King (1950)

Occupation: Opinion-monger, observer of artistic phenomena, amateur ideologue.
—Kenneth Tynan, in the Foreword to Tynan Right & Left (1967)

The word “art” is now really no use to me at all. . . . When I hear the word “art” now, I begin to yawn; to me, it’s somehow a cop-out word, a word to dodge and hedge with, a word that means something different in everyone’s mouth . . . . I’ve tried, in everything I’ve written over the last five years or so, to avoid using the word . . . .
—Kenneth Tynan, in The Sound of Two Hands Clapping (1975)

From time to time a critic emerges who may truly be said to personify a period—to embody in his person as well as in his writings the spirit of a certain historical moment. The late Kenneth Tynan (1927-80), who is now the subject of a “candid” biography written by his widow,¹ was certainly a critic of this sort. In no other writer of his generation in England were the special aspirations and the sometimes crippling contradictions of the post-World War IIcultural scene in Britain so conspicuously or so entertainingly displayed. In none were the peculiar gyrations of the Zeitgeist so graphically traced. Kingsley Amis is no doubt funnier and greater, John Wain graver, Doris Les-sing