Special K | 20 October 2016

Our collective attention spans may not be as short as is widely cited, but they are pretty short. Take the case of the art historian Kenneth Clark. If anyone remembers anything about him, it is as the presenter of Civilisation, a TV series of the 1960s that rocketed him to stardom, and the author of the accompanying book, which sold over a million copies. He died in 1983 when he was a mythical figure, and any attempt to show his human dimensions was anathema, as I discovered to my cost. My own biography of Clark was published a year later.

Nowadays, one can hardly get anyone to take him seriously. One reviewer dismissed Civilisation as a period piece, the narrator ‘a patrician’ in a tweed suit. Another spoke of ‘a figure of derision’. He was ‘the great arts panjandrum’, said a third. The word means a powerful figure but also a pretentious one — a snob.