His own life as a work of art

Reading Robert Hughes you don't expect a soft ride. On the other hand, this Australian expatriate and self-styled "cultural critic" – he was art critic for Time magazine over three decades from 1970 – can reveal a movingly tender side.

For example, in his highly readable memoir, Things I Didn't Know, he describes his encounter in the 1960s with Goya's painting in the Prado Museum in Madrid, "Execution of the Rebels on the Third of May." Hughes writes: "The painting thrilled me and, as sometimes but not often happens, moved me to tears."

He adds: "Even if you feel you should keep steady at the funerals of relatives, you should learn to weep in a museum. Earlier ages understood such matters. Men who could view the carnage-strewn fields of Waterloo or Albuera with outward impassivity, if not inner calm, were quite capable of blubbering at the sight of an Attic red-figure vase or the sound of Edmund Kean in Macbeth."

But this memoir is not for the over sensitive. Hughes's preference for uttering the occasional good old English (or Australian) obscenity rather than pussyfooting around euphemisms may seem refreshing to some and shocking to others.

Either way, he can only rarely be accused of being dull (except, strangely, enough, when talking about that greatly admired artist, Piero della Francesca). His anecdotes are frequently hilarious, sometimes cruel or vindictive, but largely entertaining. Hughes's sheer relish for writing is irresistible. He can be self-regarding but, as he looks back at his younger self, he can also be disarmingly critical and self- deprecatory.

The book starts out with a gruesome and unrelenting description (pages of it) detailing the aftermath of a car accident that might have proved fatal. A masterly chronicler of disaster, later in the book Hughes also expands brilliantly on his firsthand experience of the devastation wrought by the 1966 flood in Florence, Italy, when the Arno burst its banks, damaging countless cultural treasures.

Not unlike the Arno, Hughes is the sort of ebullient writer who floods his reader with great bursting accumulations of words and gets carried away with the sheer exuberance of his narrative. It is compelling. You don't want to miss a sentence, even when he veers off on a particular tangent or expounds at length on a particular obsession.

He discusses his Roman Catholic upbringing and schooling with frankness, aware that it has influenced his life crucially. One of his Jesuit teachers encouraged him to read widely, recognizing the boy's obviously intelligent curiosity – until a higher authority clamped down on him.

But Hughes had already begun to doubt and question required beliefs. In later years he rebelled entirely and claimed an agnostic independence.

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