Sewell’s journey from Peshawar to Wimbledon marries his love of travel and animals. Photo: ANL/REX_Shutterstock

It will surprise many people to know that Brian Sewell, famous for being Britain’s most excoriating art critic, is the gentlest of people in his private life and a great lover of animals. He was also, until laid low by cancer, in the tradition of tough British traveller-writers, such as Robert Byron, Fitzroy Maclean and Paddy Leigh Fermor, who positively relish uncomfortable parts of the world.

These two loves of his come together in his latest book, The White Umbrella, which ought to be called Travels with a Donkey but that title has already been bagged by Robert Louis Stevenson. So while the donkey, named Pavlova for its grace and length of leg, is the raison d’être of the whole story, Sewell has called his book after the robust, white canvas umbrella that his protagonist, a scholar known as Mr B, carries with him at all times.

It all starts when he sees a donkey being maltreated in Peshawar, so he buys it and realises that the best way to save it is to take it back to England. But it is so young and fragile that it can’t walk great distances, and so Mr B has to hitch rides and eventually he does get home, all the way fr om Pakistan to Wimbledon (wh ere Sewell actually lives) via Tabriz, Dogubayazit, Istanbul, Thessaloniki, Munich, Karlsruhe and Metz.

Meetings make the book

As in all good travel stories, it is the meetings on the way that make the book, including a very streetwise British ambassadress who understands the power of a good hat to bend the authorities to her will; a kind Turkish driver called Osman who wants to take them to Van, “where there are cats that swim for pleasure”; a courteous Orthodox abbot who regrets past guests who have helped themselves to books from the library; and an obliging Hector who does not at all mind carrying Pavlova in his Rolls-Royce. While obviously very autobiographical, it parts from reality in one major, poignant respect: Sewell’s dedication says “Written… with on my conscience still, that donkey in Peshawar.”

I thoroughly recommend this little book, which is charmingly illustrated by Sally Ann Lasson, to both grown-ups and literary children. by Anna Somers Cocks

The White Umbrella

Brian Sewell

Quartet Books, 184pp, £9.99 (hb)

Anna Somers Cocks is the founding editor and now chief executive of The Art Newspaper. She won the Istituto Veneto’s 2013 prize for the best piece of journalism about Venice over the previous year for her article, “The Coming Death of Venice?” in the New York Review of Books, June 2013, about the inadequate management plan for the city produced by the town council