Kenneth Tynan: A Life. By Dominic Shellard. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003; pp. 399. $35.00 cloth.

Pity the scholar asked to review a biography of Kenneth Tynan; one finds oneself frantically searching one's pockets for aphorisms, witticisms, or—at the very least—a shocking obscenity or two. After all, Tynan was the critic who so memorably dismissed a popular musical as “a world of woozy song”; met the question, “Who are the new English playwrights?” with the sarcastic rejoinder, “Who were the old ones?”; and who cried out for new playwrights to invade the British theatre because he would “rather be a war correspondent than a necrologist.” Then, of course, there is the famous first use of the word “fuck” on television and the staging of Oh, Calcutta! and the magnificent New Yorker profiles, not to mention the nearly singlehanded reshaping of British drama through the powerful combination of exhortation and satire. All in all, it is a lot for a reviewer to live up to, and while I have neither Tynan's wit nor ability to provoke, I do find myself able to produce one single Tynanesque observation about Dominick Shellard's Kenneth Tynan: A Life. This is that the book has been shockingly missubtitled.