Learning to weep in a museum

It is reasonable to assume that this is the first instalment of Robert Hughes’s autobiography. After 400 pages he takes us to his appointment as Time Magazine’s chief art critic in 1970, so The Shock of the New, The Fatal Shore and Goya lie in the future. Some might think that his choice of title gives a hostage to fortune. Australians are notoriously members of the Quiz Kid Fraternity — Clive James, Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer and the rest of us who have much smaller claims to fame. But Hughes plays fair throughout: he modifies his assured assertions on art and society with humiliating instances of his ignorance, over- confidence and poor judgment. His renunciations are epiphanies in reverse. Memories of writing for Richard Neville’s Oz are pure mea culpa. The price he paid for involvement in the excesses of play power in the Sixties was his first marriage, to a middle-class Australian hippy with a destructive taste for sex and drugs, who tormented him just when he was making his name in journalism and television.