Martin Wyld has been billed as the man who brought the nation's paintings back to life. He's just stepped down as the director of conservation at the National Gallery, having worked there, man and boy, from the age of 21 back in 1966. "I haven't had too many idle moments down the years," he says.
Well, there are quite a few people who'd have been grateful if he had enjoyed rather more moments of idleness. He's been part of the problem with the National Gallery, whereby many of its finest masterpieces have been cleaned within an inch of their aesthetic life. He's not the chief villain of the piece – that distinction must go to a German called Helmut Ruhemann, who took a merciless approach to the National's pictures, subjecting them to scientific cleansing and treating conservation less as a subjective exercise than as a work of chemistry. The critic Ernst Gombrich used to say that you could sense a Teutonic influence in the Italian galleries.
And Wyld did not, unfortunately, depart from that approach, though he points out that techniques now are very much more refined. Indeed how could he – never having worked anywhere else? Restoration at the gallery under his aegis was incessant. And the upshot is that when you put any masterpiece from the National next to companion pieces from other, continental, galleries, the result is often just embarrassing. At the Titian exhibition at the National a few years back, its own Bacchus and Ariadne (which Wyld worked on) was shockingly over-restored by comparison, say, with the Prado's Titian.
It's not as if there weren't critics at the time pointing all this out. Sarah Walden, one of Britain's great restorers – in whose house I was fortunate to live for a while – wrote a book, The Ravished Image, in the Eighties, recently republished with a foreword by Gombrich, which pointed out that in over-restoring paintings we bring our own, modern aesthetic to bear upon a very different sensibility. She was ignored. Martin Wyld, like his predecessors, went his own way. And now the damage is done.
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Antonia Fraser, in an interview with Frances Osborne, the shadow chancellor's wife, has been talking about her marriage to the playwright Harold Pinter, the subject of her new book. She is a fascinating woman, in the old sense, and her relationship with Harold P was plainly happy, but I'm not sure we should take matters entirely at her estimation. "Deep down I felt that this was the romantic love for which I had been waiting all my life," she says. "I always say to people, if you are in any doubt get married. It is a happy state."
Except that her happiness was purchased at the price of that of her then husband, Hugh Fraser, who never recovered, and that of Pinter's wife, Vivien Merchant, who died of alcoholism two years after he left her. Matrimony is a fine state, all right – unless you're already married to someone else.
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The French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy lost no time in organising a petition against the recent arrest of his friend the film director Roman Polanski, for drugging and sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl 33 years ago. "If he was a nobody he would not have gone through this," he says.
Other celebs have been less upfront. Levy complains that the actress Emma Thompson signed the petition, then phoned up to beg him to take her name off it. "Hilarious," he says.
Hard to know, isn't it, whether it's more obnoxious for Emma Thompson to protest about the arrest of a man for abusing a child, or for seemingly getting cold feet later, possibly when she realised it would harm her own image.