Through the door came a proof copy of a volume of memoirs, Art Exposed, by Julian Spalding who was a big figure in the museum world in the 1980s and 1990s – Director of Arts at Sheffield when he was still in his early thirties, then Director of Manchester Art Galleries from 1985 to 1989 (after Tim Clifford), when he moved to run the museums and galleries of Glasgow, a big job, as he makes clear (it came with access to an official Daimler which he used to visit Ian Hamilton Finlay). He did lots of good things, including opening the St. Mungo Museum of Religious Art and establishing GoMA, the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art, which is a kind of anti-Tate, full of rough and realistic Scottish figurative painting which was very fashionable in the 1980s, but seems to have largely disappeared from view. In 1998 he was a victim of municipal restructuring, the post absorbed into a department of Leisure Services, since which he has been a voice crying in the wilderness. Occasionally, his memoirs have an Ancient Mariner aspect, but they are funny, full of interesting ideas, spectacularly rude about people everyone is normally very deferential to, and a reminder of how museum life used to be when museums could be run by someone as robustly outspoken as Spalding.

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