Robert Hughes was charming to meet. A robust conversationalist, he was witty, wide ranging and courteous. In my experience he never tried to dominate even when he was the dominant personality at the table. We met over the years accidentally and casually—good acquaintances rather than friends. The more successful he became professionally, the more likeable he was as a man. You could not ask for a better companion at lunch or dinner. His eye-popping, outsize TV personality was held in abeyance in personal encounters.

His international reputation as an art critic was made over his 30-year stint at Time, 1970–2001. Like many others, I would scan the contents page at airport newsstands. If Hughes had a piece in it that week, I would buy it, confident of being entertained and instructed, an acerbic shaft in the bland pages of that once invincible newsweekly. He may not have been the most influential art critic of the age but he was certainly the most prominent. Over the decades of his American career he became, in his words, ‘a card-carrying member of the New York literati’, a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the New Republic—significant promotions from middlebrow Time.