Brian Sewell

Thursday

Brian Sewell

Bizarre Cars, by Keith Ray – review

From our UK edition

My various Oxford dictionaries define bizarre as eccentric, whimsical, odd, grotesque, fantastic, mixed in style and half-barbaric. By so many tokens, and with the casuistry of both Calvinist and Jesuit, it has been possible for the author of this pretty little Christmas-stocking book to include as bizarre any vehicle he chooses, including motorcycles and the micro-cars that made motoring possible after the defeat of Germany in 1945. Without these categories, a bus-cum-truck-cum-tractor,variations on the Hummer and the stretched limousine, and too many excursions into the bizarrerie of car names that in other languages have meanings genital and scatalogical, this book would be very thin.

Thursday

Brian Sewell

‘Lost, Stolen or Shredded’, by Rick Gekoski – review

From our UK edition

Below the title of this book, engendering immediate distrust, lies the legend ‘Stories of Missing Works of Art and Literature.’ ‘Story’ is such a weasel word, implying a tale as much as truth; a fiction that when turned into a narrative develops into the fact that every schoolboy knows; or a real event embroidered with fictitious detail to amuse; even a ripping yarn — as proves to be the case with the first of the essays in this book. ‘Has anyone seen the Mona Lisa?

Wednesday

Brian Sewell

Screen burn

From our UK edition

In mid-November an Indian chauffeur taking me to Broadcasting House made a detour to show me the Christmas lights in Regent Street. He wished to share the pleasure that they gave him and it was with glee that of the shops he used the terms ‘top class’ and ‘posh’, when to me the street seems almost as tawdry as the ghastly trek from Marble Arch to Oxford Circus. Dissembling, I went through the motions of agreement, thanked him for the treat, and fell into deep melancholy at the thought of yet another Christmas and all that it no longer means to me.

Saturday

Brian Sewell

Diary – 12 May 2012

From our UK edition

Bidden to the Barbican for the Bauhaus exhibition, I trekked from the eponymous underground station. I noted that there are many steps from the platform to the street, perhaps a little steeper than the norm, for I kept catching my crutches on them. Across the road, the narrow steps into the Barbican — a mean afterthought by a rotten architect — I know to be very steep even for a man fully fit in wind and limb. Beyond the serried tower blocks there are more steps, more generous to the lame in every dimension, and down — though they will be up on the way back and there are a hell of a lot of them. They are unswept and crumbling, their only redeeming feature a scattering of daisies in the cracks.