It is becoming increasingly fashionable for writers to question the long established heroes of the past and, in many areas, to tear down these monuments. Such a case is Colin Simpson’s book The Partnership: The Secret Association of Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen.

I so well remember some forty years ago, precious young men returning from what was, I suppose, the opposite of an outward bound course, the then Mecca of Berenson’s I Tatti, imposing their limited and lately acquired Italian on their more philistine contemporaries, talking in hushed and reverent voices and