Simon, to help her with the cartoon stories, and, in the 1930s and 40s, they collaborated on a series of comic novels, some with a balletic background and others set in various periods of English history.

After Simon's sudden death in 1948, Brahms wrote solo for some years but, in the 1950s, she established a second long-running collaboration with the writer and broadcaster Ned Sherrin, which lasted for the rest of her life.

Her parents were Henry Clarence Abrahams, a jeweller, and his wife, Pearl née Levi, a member of a Sephardic Jewish family who had come to Britain from the Ottoman Empire a generation earlier.

[2] In 1926, the artist David Low began to draw a series of satirical cartoons for the Evening Standard, featuring a small dog named "Mussolini" (later shortened to "Musso", after protests from the Italian embassy).

[4] The reviewer quoted with approval an extract from one of her poems, a child's thoughts by candlelight: This was followed the next year by a second volume, Sung Before Six, published under a different pen-name, Oliver Linden.

The first, A Bullet in the Ballet, had its genesis in a frivolous fantasy spun by the collaborators when Brahms was deputising for Arnold Haskell as dance critic of The Daily Telegraph.

… Old Stroganoff with his troubles, artistic, amorous and financial, his shiftiness, and his perpetual anxiety about the visit of the great veteran of ballet-designers – 'if 'e come', is a vital creation.

Murray commented, "True, a certain number of the laughs are invited for a moral subject that people used not to mention with such spade-like explicitness, if at all.

"[7] In The Observer, "Torquemada" (Edward Powys Mathers) commented on the "sexual reminiscences of infinite variety" and called the novel "a delicious little satire" but "not a book for the old girl".

[5][10] The authors followed up their success with a sequel, Casino for Sale (1938), featuring all the survivors from the first novel and bringing to the fore Stroganoff's rival impresario, the rich and vulgar Lord Buttonhooke.

[5] The Elephant is White (1939) tells the story of a young Englishman and the complications arising from his visit to a Russian night club in Paris.

is a Victorian Romeo and Juliet story, with affairs of the feuding middle-class Clutterwick and Shuttleforth families interspersed with 19th-century vignettes (Gilbert and Sullivan at the Savage Club, for example) and anachronistic intruders from the 20th century, including Harpo Marx, John Gielgud and Albert Einstein.

[14] In The Observer, Frank Swinnerton wrote, "They turn the Victorian age into phantasmagoria, dodging with the greatest possible nimbleness from the private to the public, skipping among historic scenes, which they often deride, and personal jokes and puns, and telling a ridiculous story while they communicate a preposterous – yet strangely suggestive – impression of nineteenth-century life.

[16] Reviewing the book in the Shakespeare Quarterly, Ernest Brennecke wrote: There is plenty of fun in the lighthearted fantasy recently perpetrated by Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon.

It solves finally the question of the "second-best" bed, Raleigh's curious obsession with cloaks, Henslowe's passion for burning down Burbage's theatres, and Shakespeare's meticulous care for his spelling.

The reviewer in The Musical Times commended it as "a good deal more than a tribute to Robert Helpmann ... its enthusiasm is of the informed variety that inspires respect, the more so as it is balanced and sane."

[3] Her solo works from this period were A Seat at the Ballet (1951) a guide for newcomers,[20] and a melodramatic romantic novel, Away Went Polly (1952), of which the critic Julian Symons wrote, "Miss Brahms is perhaps aiming at elegant sophistication; she achieves more often the ecstatically thrilled note of a saleswoman in a high-class dress shop.

[1] Nonetheless, in Sherrin's words, "it laid the foundation of a partnership which over the next twenty-eight years produced seven books, many radio and television scripts, and several plays and musicals for the theatre.

"[1] In 1962 they published a novel, Cindy-Ella – or, I Gotta Shoe, described in the TLS as "a charming, sophisticated fairy-tale … retelling the Cinderella story rather as a coloured New Orleans mother might tell it to her (precocious) daughter".

Their collaborations included Benbow Was His Name, televised in 1964, staged in 1969; The Spoils (adapted from Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton), 1968; Sing a Rude Song, a musical biography of Marie Lloyd, 1969; adaptations of farces by Georges Feydeau, Fish Out of Water, 1971, and Paying the Piper (1972); a Charles Dickens play, Nickleby and Me, 1975; Beecham, 1980, a celebration of the great conductor; and The Mitford Girls, 1981.

[5] She included an account of her theatrical experiences in a book of memoirs, The Rest of the Evening's My Own (1964), and left a second volume of reminiscences unfinished at her death, which Sherrin edited and augmented as Too Dirty for the Windmill (1986).

In The Guardian, Stephen Dixon wrote that Brahms "manages to coast over the fact that we've heard it all before by going off at entertaining tangents in a series of anecdotes, personal interpolations, witty irrelevancies and theories.

The reviewer of the TLS welcomed the reappearance of Stroganoff and judged the Chekhov stories "impressive in their evocation of another era and in their tribute to a more serious and formal art.