The almost lost art of astonishment

First, the necessary declaration of interest. The author and I were, at the age of five, at nursery school in New York together for a couple of terms. But as in the intervening 60 years I have seen him barely half a dozen times, in crowded rooms, I feel free to say that he is in my view the best drama critic and showbiz profile-writer we have.

Partly, I have to add, this is the luck of the draw: at the New Yorker where he now works, he is given a couple of pages a week to expand on a single Broadway first night, and even better, given three or four months to write a profile of several thousand words.

Fourteen of these are reprinted here; the author himself calls them ‘mini-biographies’ and he is not far wrong. If you are an actor or a dramatist or even a stand-up comic and John Lahr suggests an interview, don’t expect the usual hurried half hour or so in a bar.