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Art historian, writer and broadcaster Sir Roy Strong has enjoyed half a century as one of the leading figures in Britain’s art world. The former director of the National Portrait Gallery and Victoria and Albert Museum talks to art critic Brian Sewell about his early years before he rose to fame, which he describes in his new book, Self-Portrait as a Young Man. Strong tells of his social origins in suburban North London, his grammar school and university education, and of the development of his lifelong passion for the culture and history of England.

The world he describes is one dominated by hierarchy and class up which the new ‘meritocrats’ like himself and Alan Bennett began to climb. It is also a time of big change as the drab London of the 1950s turns into the swinging sixties.