Special K | 20 October 2016

Our collective attention spans may not be as short as is widely cited, but they are pretty short. Take the case of the art historian Kenneth Clark. If anyone remembers anything about him, it is as the presenter of Civilisation, a TV series of the 1960s that rocketed him to stardom, and the author of the accompanying book, which sold over a million copies. He died in 1983 when he was a mythical figure, and any attempt to show his human dimensions was anathema, as I discovered to my cost. My own biography of Clark was published a year later.

Nowadays, one can hardly get anyone to take him seriously. One reviewer dismissed Civilisation as a period piece, the narrator ‘a patrician’ in a tweed suit. Another spoke of ‘a figure of derision’. He was ‘the great arts panjandrum’, said a third. The word means a powerful figure but also a pretentious one — a snob.

Nobody reads his first volume of autobiography, Another Part of the Wood, any more, and so no one has understood what special qualities of mind invigorate his works, though they are clear enough on the page: honesty, insight, humour and a complete lack of self-importance. He described his parents as the idle rich: ‘Many people were richer, but there can have been few who were idler’. He introduced their competing temperaments: an emotionally blocked mother and grandly alcoholic father. ‘He put up with her bouts of self-pity and she devoted her whole life to an unsuccessful attempt to stop him drinking.’

They might have been, as Clark said, ‘as ignorant as swans’, but they recognised their gifted son’s love of art. Their innate understanding of his career path was at odds with their colossal ignorance of his emotional needs. His mother glided through his life like a somnambulist.