Max Hastings on Brian Sewell: extravagant, brilliant and bankable

‘He possessed the gifts of all successful polemicists: conceit, passion, wit, literary elegance and an instinctive suspicion of, and disdain for, power and wealth’ Brian Sewell, who died in September, would surely have enjoyed Tuesday’s memorial service in his honour at St James’s Piccadilly. It was standing room only with 600 people in attendance.Then again, it was often difficult to predict how Sewell, described in the Guardian’s obituary of him as Britain’s