Fashion Flashes

• Kenneth Tynan: Letters edited by Kathleen Tynan
  Weidenfeld, 669 pp, £22.00, November 1994, ISBN 0 297 81076 6

This must be a brave letter. No exotic quotations; no miserable, ignominious echoes of Swinburne, no trace of silvery, erotic decadence; no Musset; no motif of Delius – nothing but lucidity ... There’s a programme of insouciant, lilting French cabaret songs on the radio as I write and I have just lit a cigarette. Try and see me.

Kenneth Tynan, aged 18, writing from Edgbaston, to his girlfriend Pauline Whittle