Life of Brian

‘It must be so awfully boring being a fish,’ says Brian Sewell, as he looks out the window at his pond. ‘You can only have sex once a year on a prescribed day. The frogs are just the same.’

We are in his study. It is a large room full of books, mostly big art books. An old German Shepherd lies passed out on the floor. ‘Poor Winckelmann,’ says Sewell, peering down at the dog. ‘She is the love of my life. I can’t bear the thought of her departure. But I know she’s going.’

Sex and death are on Sewell’s mind. His memoirs, Outsider: Always Almost, Never Quite, have just been published, and the newspapers have taken a keen interest. ‘Everybody seems to have focused on the sex, which is rather boring,’ he says.

Boring, maybe, but inevitable: he has put a lot of sex in the book. ‘That’s because there’s a lot of sex in my life,’ he snaps. Well, yes. In the first few chapters, he speculates that his father sired him while being buggered and that his mother was a prostitute. He recalls many boyish fumbles and describes his later ‘metamorphosis from celibate to whore’ as he abandoned Catholicism and pursued a vigorously promiscuous life.

Such revelations are a publisher’s dream. Yet they seem odd coming from Brian Sewell the eminent art critic, ferocious opponent of things puerile and licentious. Might he be accused, like a Tracey Emin or a Damien Hirst, of trying to shock? ‘There wasn’t much trying,’ he says. ‘It was easy.’

He is worried, though, about upsetting readers. ‘I have a great many — this sounds very vain, but it is a fact — elderly admirers, people of my own age, who regard me as some kind of monument of how things should be.