Word: tynan
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...looks remarkably like nothing much. He is rather short and shapeless, with milk-bottle shoulders, chubby hands and a prosperous waistline. He is balding, jug-eared, and his pale phiz is blotched with pale freckles and pale blue eyes. His usual expression is an unemphatic blank. Critic Kenneth Tynan once mused that "the number of false arrests following the circulation of his description would break all records...
...Action. As soon as the curtain rang down, Colin Wilson buttonholed Tynan, hissed: "Tell your friend to keep his filthy mouth closed or we'll get him." "Stay out of my life, Wilson," growled Tynan and pushed past to join his wife and Logue in the pub next door. They were barely seated when the door burst open, and in poured the Exemplars. Scattering longhairs and spilling beers, Wilson, Holroyd, Playwright Michael (Yes-and After) Hastings, 20, Novelist Bill (The Divine and the Decay) Hopkins, 29, and their partisans pushed up to the Exertionists' table...
...next thing I could hear," said Logue later, "was Wilson shouting 'Stand up, Logue, stand up, Logue,' in the true, lower-middle-class English fashion." Wilson flailed wildly at Tynan. "You deliberately tried to sabotage the play," he shouted. "I'll stamp you out, Tynan. Literature isn't big enough for both...
Just as the bartender moved in to break it up, Tynan leveled a long finger at Wilson. "There's your supposed leader, your younger generation," he cried. "He's a dictator. He reminds me of the Oswald Mosley meetings before the war." "Terrific!" roared John Osborne. "A row like this is just what I've been looking for." Explained Logue later: "I objected to the philosophical statement, implied in every line, that we must suffer, that attempts to check, alter, reform, change our sufferings are impudence...
Next day the critics panned The Tenth Chance. "Sadistic spinach," said Tynan in his column in the Sunday Observer...