Brian Sewell is an odd cove – the odd cove's odd cove, indeed. His fellow art critics and other worthies – an innocuous lot – once signed a general letter demanding that he be sacked from his job on the Evening Standard, thereby assuring that he would be secure in perpetuity. Gay people of a younger generation tend to roll their eyes at the mention of his name, since he carried on the general principle that your boyfriend had to be referred to as "my cousin, several times removed, from Sicily" decades after it had stopped being necessary. He is, of course, regularly referred to as a "national treasure", as is anyone who reads out the voiceover for television adverts more than three times a year.
But it was his first volume of memoirs that placed him squarely in public favour. The second volume, indeed, is almost better than the first – lewd, very funny, not very likeable but possessed of a festival turn of abuse.
He has, too, in this volume the advantage of a couple of very good subjects. The art world comes in for it in detail, and their willingness to overlook a shocking forgery for the sake of a quick buck makes for a number of excellent stories. His atrocious mother's decline and death make one important strand in this book – "'Oh you,' she said, screwing up her face in enmity, 'you know everything.'"
The centrepiece, however, is the fall and disgrace of Sewell's mentor, Anthony Blunt. Sewell is one of a generation who believed it was genuinely worse to betray a friend than to betray one's country. On Blunt's exposure, Sewell helped to conceal him from the media, and was known to do so. He came in for a measure of the abuse heaped on his master and friend. I'm not sure what anyone else would have done for an old friend, and others helped Blunt in different ways. Though what Blunt did was dreadful, his treatment was brutal – not just Blunt, but Sewell too was stripped of his library privileges at the Courtauld. No doubt both of them experienced offensive and frightening behaviour from strangers in the street who believed that Blunt had sent men to their deaths by his treason.
The joy of the memoir, however, is not in the innate value of his views on anything in particular, but in the peculiar personality revealed, and in the energy of the writing. One undeserving object after another is dragged through the mud. "Sometimes he came from his farm in Buckinghamshire in a wooden-bodied Austin Hereford shooting brake, a favourite pig sitting upright in the passenger seat beside him – the pair of them resembling a demonstration diagram from some 18th-century tome on physiognomy and expression."
That is a description, let it be said, of one of Sewell's friends. And the enemies?
Poor old Sarah Kent, the former visual arts editor of Time Out, is left his eyes in one of a long sequence of wills. Somebody ought to publish those. I bet they're hilarious exercises in score-settling. Norman Lebrecht, the music writer, gets the full treatment: "Never was a favourite so puffed up with amour-propre, so arrogant and so thick-skinned." Blunt's awful boyfriend is glimpsed "sinking into boredom and inactivity; he could spend hours slicing carrots very thin and whining on the telephone in the vile slang of the malevolent queen." (Loving those carrots). Sewell is magnificently snobbish in a period way, still speaking of "those who hasten from the Clapham Omnibus into the National Gallery" without any acknowledgement that Clapham, for some time, has not been the natural home of the horny-handed son of toil.
Interestingly, human beings don't have to do anything very much to make themselves totally unacceptable – not knowing enough about Leonardo, spontaneously providing Sewell with a hot blond boy for company, or being too keen on Damien Hirst will do. On the other hand, any old dog can shit on the carpet all they like, and be rewarded by a forgiving twinkle in her master's eye – "I am content to tolerate the consequence of her relaxing sphincter."
It's not the only incongruity buried in Sewell's personality. He evidently thinks pretty highly of himself – "I have just read some of that catalogue [of a Council of Europe rococo exhibition in 1958 he wrote] and am astonished by how good it is – my present sense that the essentials of all writing on art should be clarity and thoroughness was obviously well-established before it became my sole occupation." Thoroughness is a very good thing indeed, but perhaps we would trust Sewell's devotion, and his thorough disdain for that honourable breed, newspaper subs, if he had somewhere learnt that it is Wilfrid, not Wilfred Blunt, Compostela, not Compostella, and so on. I do think that a worldly art critic should know that the gallery in Munich is the Pinakothek, not the Pinakotek, too.
Like many people who think themselves amusing, he's slow to recognise a joke when made by anyone else – when Blunt said it was "strange to find a Scottish restaurant in Dusseldorf" when driving past a McDonald's, even he could not have been so innocent.
Never mind. The joy of the memoir is largely in its filth, beyond the reach of any goggle-eyed fact-checker. "Geoffrey was a dab hand at making buggers of men who had never thought of it." Here Sewell's insight is unfaultable, though sometimes faintly incredible.
There is a glorious, though barely believable story of a memorable evening round the Royal Military Police barracks which ends with Sewell being delivered by the copper and his room-mate into the mess room. "Anyone want him before I let him go? He's a bloody good fuck." (To get the most out of these excellent tales, you have to think of them in Sewell's dowager tones). There is a useful tip about how to avoid being picked out by the river police with their searchlights, should you be shagging in the cruising ground near Hammersmith Bridge. Your partner in joy might well, Sewell tells us, be an oarsman, who were "always sheepishly passive, uncooperative in any foreplay, just wanting to be fucked – something to do with the repetitive action of rowing, I suppose." When a gentleman caller did make it home, his awful mother did her best to rain on Sewell's one-man parade. "You're not the only one," she told a surprised Danish colleague. "He's got a little Scottish boy, you ought to know."
Awful as he no doubt is, his memoirs are tremendously enjoyable. He has never written with more haughty, scabrous bathos as here, and never writes better than in telling some much-honed anecdote of bad sexual behaviour.
Possibly his sexual partners, these days, are not quite so abundant or as disinterestedly enthusiastic as they once were: still, they make a good story. "I considered the indignity of the spectator not worth the candle.
"He tried a better offer. 'Pay for my drugs and you can fuck me while I fuck her.'" And even if you can't bear the notion of Brian Sewell, his opinions and his duchessy persona, then there is something irresistible about his memoirs. It's how well they are written. Face it: whose memoirs would you rather read? His, or Sarah Kent's?
• Philip Hensher's The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting, and Why it Still Matters is published by Macmillan.
