S. J. Simon

From 1937 until his death, he collaborated with Caryl Brahms on a series of comic novels and short stories, mostly with a background of ballet or of English history.

In the 1920s he was studying forestry, when he met Caryl Brahms, who recruited him to help her write the captions for "Musso, the home page dog", a daily series of satirical cartoons drawn by David Low in The Evening Standard.

In The Times Literary Supplement, David Murray wrote that the book provoked "continuous laughter ... 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".

[10][11] 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.

[10] 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 ("At the Savage Club the atmosphere is tense.

[15] 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.

[17] 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.

[19] Their Tudor novel, No Bed for Bacon, was dramatised for the theatre after Simon's death by Brahms and the young Ned Sherrin, with music by Malcolm Williamson and staged in 1959.

[22] He won the Gold Cup twice (1937 and 1947), the National Pairs (1939), and played for England in the Camrose home internationals on six occasions, all victories.

In this [i.e. his obituary in The Observer] I described the television date: I commented on his distinctive style – the omission of the personal pronoun, the disregard for syntax – and ended: He taught his team-mates to play and to laugh ... Skid lived to the age of 44 – by a series of miracles.