‘Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds’ were the words theatre critic Kenneth Tynan had pinned above his desk. Perhaps no writer of our times followed those instructions more obediently than the late Brian Sewell, who died ten years ago today. Called by the Guardian ‘Britain’s most famous and controversial art critic’, Sewell, who wrote mainly for the Evening Standard, never seemed far away from trouble. According to Brian’s memoir, he was reportedly spat at and thumped by RA exhibition-organiser Norman Rosenthal, received a black eye from one young painter – ‘the blow so heavy that it disrupted sight for several weeks’ – and was beaten over the head by a Bond Street art dealer with a wet umbrella (‘clammily unpleasant but, unfurled, an ineffective weapon’). Sewell was lampooned for his snobbishness, his homosexuality and his unbelievably posh and prim way of speaking (‘You’ve had elocution lessons!’ boys hissed at him, inaccurately, at school). He was once attacked in an open letter, signed by 35 luminaries of the arts world, denouncing his ‘dire mix of sexual and class hypocrisy, intellectual posturing and artistic prejudice’. None of this seemed to knock him back or chasten him in any way. ‘Nothing matters more than intellectual probity,’ he once declared, ‘and on that altar the critic must sacrifice even his closest friends.’ Many of us knew him as an edgy, dangerous chat-show guest – openly inveighing against Tracy Emin and conceptual art, dismissing Victoria Beckham as a ‘common little bitch’ to an open-mouthed Alan Titchmarsh. He was also a dream panellist on Have I Got News for You, needling the other guests, frequently dissolving into giggling fits. He was lofty, cherubic, mischievous, camp, slightly sinister and, in his disdain, deadly serious. ‘Art history,’ he wrote, ‘is not merely the disciplined recounting of dates and documents, but an adventure into the spirit and humanity of man.’ There was much more to Brian Sewell than the media caricature he played upon, as his two-volume autobiography, Outsider – Always Almost: Never Quite, made clear. He was the bastard son of Peter Warlock (the kind of minor English composer Radio 3 used to make programmes about, who committed suicide before his son’s birth), and was brought up by a bigamous, unloved stepfather and a mother he suspected of having sold sexual favours to pay the bills. Sewell, a not-so-lapsed Catholic (in his youth he had plans to become an Roman Catholic priest), was also a firm believer in assisted dying: ‘I can think of no more loving act of friendship than that push.’ Having thrived chastely in the army during National Service, he was a great advocate for that too: Only a fool could do two years National Service and resent it as a waste of time… If I am now capable of making worthwhile moral judgements, it is because I was for two brief years a soldier of sorts, not because I am an art historian, a lapsed Conservative, an agnostic Christian. His passion for art began early – by the age of 8, he said, ‘there was not a major museum or art gallery in London I did not know.’ Awarded a place to study history at Oxford, he felt instead the ‘overwhelming siren call of the Courtauld Institute’ and went off to pursue history of art under Anthony Blunt. Blunt was unmasked as a Soviet spy and traitor by Margaret Thatcher in 1979, a time when Sewell turned from protégé to protector and virtually became Blunt’s spokesman. He remained eternally grateful to his mentor, crediting Blunt with ‘transforming the underfunded, academically obscure and scarcely reputable Institute into a school of art history that would rival, equal and surpass all the schools […] long established in Germany and central Europe.’ The Courtauld Institute, he added, made most of its students ‘closed to any career that did not involve the further pursuit of art history.’ This, of course, tore him away from his vocation as a Catholic priest and left him with a sense of dilemma that never lifted. He would, he wrote, feel guilty if he wandered past the local Carmelite church ‘without nipping in for a quick genuflection and a dab of cold water’ but also loved fast cars, malicious gossip, promiscuous sexual encounters and a succession of dogs. ‘Dogs,’ wrote his editor Max Hastings, ‘are the only people for whom he feels unqualified enthusiasm.’ Politically a ‘natural conservative’, he stated his credo thus: My Conservatism is rooted in the conviction that all men are not equal, and that were we all given an equal chance, we would achieve very different ends and again be unequal within a generation… My Conservatism is rooted in philanthropy, in the conviction that none should starve on the streets, live, sleep or die there… My Conservatism is rooted in the passionate belief that it is through education, cultural, classical and Christian, that men learn the ancient virtues and philosophical abstractions – justice, probity, generosity, nobility, gravity, forgiveness, pru