Success Quote by Kenneth Tynan

Tynan’s line flatters a city by stripping it of its museum label. “Living immediacy” isn’t just praise; it’s a provocation from a critic who distrusted reverence and preferred the electric present tense of performance. Calling the city “urgent” makes it sound less like a place than like a deadline. You don’t visit it so much as you submit to it, and the reward (or cost) is amnesia: “I lose all sense of the past.”

That’s a canny reversal. Most cultural writing about great cities leans on history as prestige, the old stones as proof of seriousness. Tynan implies the opposite: the city’s power is that it refuses to be safely archived. The subtext is a critique of nostalgia as a form of cultural sleepwalking. If you can’t remember the past while you’re there, it’s because the city has monopolized your attention the way a great show does, crowding out reflection with sensation, speed, and newness.

Context matters: Tynan came of age in postwar Britain, when “the past” wasn’t an aesthetic mood but an institution - class etiquette, imperial afterglow, dutiful taste. As a theatrical firebrand and early champion of modern, risk-taking work, he treated tradition as something that had to earn its keep. The sentence performs that attitude: short, sweeping, slightly scandalized by its own intensity. It doesn’t claim the past is worthless; it suggests the city makes it irrelevant, at least temporarily, which is the more radical compliment.