Brit-watching with brio

IRMA KURTZ's love affair with London began early in the 1960s, when the King's Road was still a village high street with butchers and greengrocers. It" wasn't the young New Yorker's first serious relationship. That was Paris, but like a jilted lover she never quite" forgot, or forgave. It is this three-city perspective that gives Dear London, her witty and poignant memoir of those years, its richness and depth.

If you remember the Sixties, they, say, you can't have been there. But Irma Kurtz does and was. As an outsider, Manhattan-raised, she took notice in a way natives (including myself) did not. My own drift across the city mirrored hers; the drift of the young and the broke which started in Chelsea, moved to. Notting Hill ("the louche charm of a frontier town") and thence to "the rural urban domesticity" of Shepherd's Bush, pushed on and out by the prosperity that flourished in our wake.

Irma Kurtz was a decade older than erstwhile dolly-birds like me, ironing our long blonde hair. With her "American know-how to complement the British know-who" she was already climbing the media ladder, interviewing the newly rich and briefly famous for Nova, the Shooting star in the 1960s magazine firmament.

"The irreverence of English humour is the biggest ostensible difference between the US and the UK,", she writes. Her own self-effacing wit found a home with the English, whose idiosyncrasies and vanities she captures with affection wrapped around acute social observation - and no hint of the glib condescension so beloved of fellow Brit-watching American, Bill Bryson.

Motherhood arrived late and by stealth, and I suspect Kurtz spent more time being a friend than being a lover. There are no stories here of, passion, except in the spent phase. Yet she went on to become agony-aunt to a generation in Nova's successor Cosmopolitan, dealing with sex and its emotional fallout with sassy compassion.

Her introduction to sex, as distinct from love, could only have happened in the Sixties. PR to what she believes is Parisian-style cabaret, young Kurtz's first visit to Raymond's Revue Bar reveals the grimy truth. Striptease artiste Gigi L'amour turns out to be "Myrtle Crockett, a former hairdresser from Balham". Nothing daunted, Kurtz soon find herself on the masthead of King Paul Raymond's answer to Playboy, a world which she deftly deflates. ("There is no more mystery to a girlie magazine than to a cookery book, it's equally functional, and the user always has the ingredients to hand.")

From taxi-drivers to northern journalists, colonels to dentists, Kurtz's London miniatures are painted with delicacy and originality. These were the days when "snappers, troubadours and crimpers" were society's darlings.. Why, she asks a friend, had hair-dressing become the libertine's charter? "Because nothing suits an Englishman better than to tender service from behind."

Although a long-time hackette ("more credulous than cynical") there is no sense in Kurtz's writing, of the tired epithet; just wry, perceptive humour. Her description of photographers as "a disarmingly boyish lot, comparable to racing car drivers, charmers of their special world, half man, half machine" could not be bettered.

Expatriation, she explains, is an ongoing process, "like a sex change, subject to fits and starts". She is now a naturalised Brit with an English son, but New York's siren call continues to haunt her ("the streets', surged with their usual energy, filling my head with the roar of surf and calling me out to play."). Soho is the nearest thing London cane offer, so that's where she now lives the bittersweet life of "tedium, discipline and frustrated desire that is a woman's independence".

Strangers, she tells us, "increasingly turn our to be people I used to know.