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...