[2] He then undertook a year's private tuition with a crammer after which he headed the scholarship list at Balliol College, Oxford, where he shared the Jenkyns exhibition in 1913 and took a double first in classical honour moderations (1911) and literae humaniores (1913).

He was assigned to the Home Office, where his career lasted two days: finding himself asked to deal with an application by Staffordshire police for the increased provision of lavatories he wrote his comments and walked out, to earn his living writing as a freelance about subjects of more interest to him.

[5] His opposite number on The Daily Telegraph, W. A. Darlington, wrote of Brown, "No contemporary drama critic has enjoyed a higher reputation for good judgment combined with witty and scholarly writing".

His responses to the expressionists such as Karel Čapek, Luigi Pirandello, Elmer Rice and Eugene O'Neill were collected in a volume, Masques and Phrases (1926), compiled from his press reviews.

[1] Brown had his blind spots: as late as 1934 he dissented from the – by then – wide admiration led by F. R. Leavis, F. O. Matthiessen, Cleanth Brooks and others of T. S. Eliot and The Waste Land.

[10] In addition to his work for The Guardian, Brown became the drama critic for the Saturday Review in 1923 and was the Shute lecturer in the art of the theatre at Liverpool University three years later.

Garvin was a Conservative and Astor and his fellow directors wished to give the paper a new political attitude – "more progressive at home, more international abroad".

[11] He served as editor until Astor's son David officially succeeded him in 1948, after which he continued as the paper's drama critic until he was replaced by Kenneth Tynan in 1954.

[2] He was awarded honorary degrees by the universities of St Andrews and Aberdeen and in recognition of post-war lectures he gave in Denmark he received the knighthood of the Order of the Dannebrog.

Darlington said of him: "In private life he was a staunch friend and good companion, but because he concealed his kind heart under an undemonstrative, even dour, manner, some people found him alarming.

[6] His friend George Lyttelton (to whom he dedicated Words in Season, 1961)[14] described him as "a dry wine perhaps, but full of flavour" and his publisher, Rupert Hart-Davis, found him "nice as ever but even more liberally spread with scurf, cigarette-ash and shaving-soap than usual".

[16] He became famous for his books about words, "agreeable rambles around correct usage and philology, enlivened by literary allusion, quotation, wit, and personal anecdote".