"James Evershed Agate" was a British diarist and critic. In the period between the wars, he was one of Britain's most influential theatre critics. After working in his father's business until his late twenties he found his way into journalism, being on the staff of The Guardian/The Manchester Guardian (1907–14); drama critic for Saturday Review (London)/The Saturday Review (1921–23), and The Sunday Times (UK)/The Sunday Times (1923–47), and holding the same post for the BBC (1925–32).

Agate's diaries and letters, published in a series of nine volumes under the title of Ego, are a record of the British theatre of his era and also of his non-theatrical interests, including sports, social gossip and his private preoccupations with his health and precarious finances. In addition to drama criticism he wrote about the cinema and English literature for London newspapers, and published three novels, translated a play and had it staged in London, albeit briefly, and regularly brought out collections of his theatre essays and reviews.

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Your Englishman, confronted by something abnormal will always pretend that it isn't there. If, however, you force him to look into it, he'll at once pretend that he sees the object not for what it is but for something that he would like it to be.

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New Year's Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.

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The worst of failure of this kind is that it spoils the market for more competent performers.

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My mind is not a bed to be made and remade.

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The Englishman can get along with sex quite perfectly so long as he can pretend that it isn't sex but something else.

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I don't know very much, but what I do know I know better than anybody, and I don't want to argue about it. I know what I think about an actor or an actress, and am not interested in what anybody else thinks.

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I wonder what it is in the New York air that enables me to sit up till all hours of the night in an atmosphere which in London would make a horse dizzy, but here merely clears the brain.

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Don't pity me now, don't pity me never; I'm going to do nothing for ever and ever.

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