Brian Sewell does some donkey work: how Britain’s best-known art critic put his ass on the line

I suppose all children’s authors write the stories they would have liked to read as children. But in the case of this novella about a sensitive man called Mr B who rescues a donkey in Peshawar, names her Pavlova after the ballerina, and brings her overland all the way back home to Wimbledon to meet his dogs named after women painters of the 20th century, this feeling that the target reader is the childhood author himself is overwhelming. You learn more about the young, sweet, aesthetically precocious Brian Sewell while reading it than you do even about Persian carpets and the dusty towns on the old Silk Route.

Most popular

Ross Clark

The electric car honeymoon is over

This is the old Brian Sewell telling a story to the young Brian Sewell. Both are soppy about four-footed animals, so the bringing-a-donkey-home storyline is ideal. The old Brian takes on (for the purpose of his foray into children’s-story writing) an avuncular but still fastidious and occasionally waspish Sewell-ish voice.