World of Brian Sewell, art critic Routine I rise at 7am and let my three dogs, Winckelmann, Lottie and Gretel, into the garden before preparing coffee, because I can't function without it. After breakfasting on muesli, I begin writing - in my dressing gown, because I can get going faster. During the night I wake constantly and wonderful sentences come into my head. They are still bubbling over the next morning, so I scribble them down in my unshaven, unwashed state, anxious to preserve them. I'm sure I was a dog in a previous existence because everything has to be as it always is - the right pen, the right paper, in the right place - otherwise I can't do it. I write every day, but by 5pm I've had it. Besides, by then, the dogs have to be entertained. Whitstable My friend the artist Dean Marsh painted this picture of an oyster shell (shown, previous page) which reminds me of Whitstable - the one element of stability in my haphazard childhood. It was where my mother fled when she ran out of money, to a cottage that had been leased by my father as a place where they could have clandestine meetings. The cottage was right on the beach and it was possible when the tides were very high to climb out of the back window and drop straight into the water. Blitz This 19th-century porcelain statue of the Madonna (pictured) was pressed into my mother's arms in the middle of the Blitz by a neighbour, a German Jew, with the words, 'This is probably more use to you than us. It was a sudden impulse, but it was a very treasured decoration because they'd brought it all the way from Nazi Germany. I associate it with my Catholic inheritance, which has had a profound impact. It's also my German inheritance because the German Jews were so important in terms of our cultural leapfrogging in the 1940s. Culture in Britain in 1939 bore no resemblance at all to culture in Britain in 1945. Criticism I have been a lone voice in the world of art criticism - despised and rejected. There's an enormous amount of resentment because I am not a member of the club. Do I enjoy my notoriety? I take a deep breath and get on with it. Voice There's a popular misconception that I'm a hoity-toity aristocrat, which seems ludicrous when I look at my out-of-elbows cardigans. It's the curse of my speech. But this is the way I have always spoken, it's the way my mother spoke, and would have been totally unremarkable in the 1930s. Nevertheless, it has been a real barrier in television. I'm the art critic who is best known throughout the country and the least used. Picasso This glove (pictured), given to me by a friend, was sent to Picasso from Guernica at the time of the bombing during the Spanish Civil War, with the words, 'This is what has happened in Guernica. It arrived halfway through the painting of the great picture, and it influenced Picasso into reversing the figure of the fallen warrior in the lower left foreground - and giving it the gauntlet. Picasso signed it, and after all these years it still smells of smoke. I never met him, though I once called on the art historian Douglas Cooper, who threw a crumpled sweatshirt at me and said, 'You've just missed Picasso, but here's his sweatshirt. For years I didn't wash it, but it began to smell so foul that I had it laundered. I felt I'd destroyed its identity. Anthony Blunt The tiny porcelain bust of Shakespeare (pictured) was given to me by Elsie Crosbie, the wife of Theodore Crosbie, the art critic for the collectors" magazine Apollo. Our friendship was deepened by her support of Anthony Blunt during the crisis [it was Sewell who spirited Blunt away from the eyes of the press in 1979 after his exposure as 'the Fourth Man" in the Burgess-Maclean spy scandal]. She telephoned almost every day during that business. She would say, 'Are they listening? And I would reply, 'I'm sure they are," because I had very good reason to believe my telephone had been tapped. 'In that case," she'd say, 'let's give them something to listen to." And she would talk dirty for several minutes. Mop I travelled in Turkey at great length for a number of years and always carried the same knapsack (pictured). In 1987, while following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, I found an abandoned puppy with a dislocated shoulder and broken foreleg. She was terribly dehydrated and I couldn't leave her, so I jettisoned as many belongings as I could and carried her in my knapsack for another 600 miles. Eventually I sent her back to England and she was my dog for 12 years. I christened her Mop because I found her on a site named after an Ancient Greek seer called Mopsus. Ageing I am philosophical about old age. As for whether I fear death - I shan't know until it's there. All I really want is to wake up and find that every one of my 17 dogs, past and present, is round my bed. Then I shall know that I'm dead, but happily so.