The eighteenth-century French Academician Buffon gave the world the aphorism ‘Le style est l’homme même’. It makes a fine epitaph for H.G. Kippax. Harry Kippax was a distinguished journalist and, for more than thirty years, until his retirement in 1989, a theatre critic of singular authority and style. In the late 1950s, while employed by the Sydney Morning Herald, he began to write thoughtful freelance reviews under the pseudonym Brek in the fortnightly periodical Nation; in 1966 the SMH’s editor J.D. Pringle press-ganged him into the theatre critic’s chair.