The best British theatre critics have generally been, like James Fenton (who [in You Were Marvellous] is clearly offering himself for judgment only by the highest standards), provocative, opinionated and bookish rather than theatrical by training. But Fenton's peers in the past—Cibber, Hazlitt, Shaw, Beerbohm, Tynan—have also nearly all been wits, smooth, sharp, cutting, often killingly funny and, to a man, dab hands at description.

Fenton belongs to an altogether more puritanical tradition. Evocation is not his forte. His verdicts, often just and sometimes memorably offensive … are always magisterial. His style is high-minded, heavy-handed and, when it comes to performance, direction and design, so uninformative that his column reads at times like an end-of-term report….

For Fenton, the theatre holds nothing in the way of fashion or frivolity, little passion and absolutely no sensuous appeal….

But the great virtue of this eccentric critic is precisely the seriousness with which he takes himself, his trade and the theatre which it is his delight to study and evaluate. He thinks, reads, compares, weighs and judges, in a word he ponders; and, in an age so conditioned by and to snap judgments, ponderousness has its points. Fenton brings a clear and concentrated intelligence to bear on matters not usually thought worth assessing at this level. Above all, he minds about the theatre so much, with such energy and earnestness, that it seems ungrateful to ask for a touch of something worldlier as well; or, as Fenton says himself, 'once again, the Observer is demanding the impossible.'