Pens, sex and potatoes

I hoped that Bronte would be filled with Victorian writers licking ink off their fingers and bitching about Mrs Gaskell being a third-rate hack; but it is not to be. (Do not think I am vulgar. My description is accurate. Wuthering Heights is a rude novel, and Jane Eyre is worse. St John Rivers, its Christian Grey, is surely a Spectator subscriber). It is, instead, a finely wrought and glossy restaurant off Trafalgar Square, designed, I suspect, for advertising executives. It used to be the Strand Dining Rooms but it died and now there’s this.

It is named for Horatio Nelson, the Duke of Bronte. His title, it is believed, was borrowed by Patrick Brunty, the Irish blacksmith’s apprentice who educated himself and came to England to father a literary dynasty by mistake. Patrick was a skilled public relations man and curate; he added a stylish umlaut. The Brontës, of course, have their own homage restaurant in Haworth.