A fail-safe route into the combative life of the art critic Brian Sewell (1931–2015) is by way of extended quotation. Here he is on the very first page of his voluminous memoirs, recently published in a single edition by Quartet, writing about the woman who brought him up:
My earliest recollection of my mother is of my looking down on her and recognising fear. I have no memory of looking up at her, or seeing the bodyless head in which analysts who bother themselves with the earliest artistic impulses of the child would have us believe, the great smiling face of the adult looming over the cradle or the pram, but looking down from the not inconsiderable height of an overhanging branch has stayed with me all my life, not because of the adventure of climbing there—that I remember not at all—but for the startling clarity of a powerful emotion that I had never seen before and did not comprehend. The tree still stands in the garden of Cefin Bryntalch, an unlovely Victorian house in Powys recently described by agents selling it as “innovative for its use of Neo-Georgian style which is worked into the expressive forms of brick vernacular revival” (house agents rival art critics in the meaningless jargon of their propaganda).1
In the end there is something rather exhilarating about the sky-high levels of bitchiness on display in this carefully wrought charge sheet, so much so that I began to make a list of
