Self-portrait as a Young Man, by Roy Strong — review

Eventually, all of Sir Roy Strong’s voluminous personal archive is going — like Alan Bennett’s — to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Riffling through it, he realised there was something missing: he had not adequately covered the years between 1935, when he was born, and 1967, when he became director of the National Portrait Gallery — as the Daily Mail put it in 1969, ‘Britain’s most improbable civil servant’. He has written this book to remedy the omission. That it is published by the Bodleian is yet another feather in Strong’s fedora.

If you were in the anti-Strong faction (I am not, but it does exist), you might summarise the rite of passage chronicled in the book as ‘from geek to freak’. It tells how an earnest swot from a lower-middle-class family in Enfield, with ‘bat ears’ (his phrase), turned himself into a Sixties dandy with a super-posh accent, a key figure in Swinging London.