Robert Hughes- Grumpy old Man

Despite what I have written recently- I don't think Robert Hughes is all that bad.

He's a bit of a grumpy old bugger, but that's about it.

The Australian seems to have taken a bit of an interest with this article.

Basically- it's an 'I'm not the arsehole the media paint me to be, I actually don't mind Australia, buy my new book' story.

On Germanine Greer v Steve Irwin:

'It also rapidly became clear that any Greer-Hughes cabal might end in fisticuffs. "Germaine I basically can't stand," he says. "Oh, she's never done me any harm, but her pretensions to being the grande dame of Aboriginehood and all that stuff are ludicrous. There's no question about her intelligence, but the uses she makes of it ... man!"

He was most recently appalled by Greer's attack on Steve Irwin, the Australian crocodile hunter who was killed by a stingray. Hughes says he had barely heard of Irwin and "certainly didn't know he was regarded as this (Australian) hero ... Then Germaine weighs in with all this stuff about the torturer of reptiles and disturber of the natural order, and I mean, for Christ's sake, who gives a flying f-- about that?"'

On becoming an art critic:

'Hughes reveals in his new memoir that he became an art critic by accident. He was working as a cartoonist on a fortnightly Australian journal called The Observer, which was modelled on Britain's The Spectator. The journal's previous art critic was found to have reviewed an exhibition of Blake drawings without having bothered to see it. The Observer's editor Donald Horne promptly fired him and asked if there was anyone else on the staff who knew anything about art. Nobody spoke up. "You're the cartoonist," Horne then told Hughes. "You ought to know something about art. Good. Now you're the f--ing art critic."'