It is Thursday May 20, 2021, and Campbell Flynn – “tall and sharp at fifty-two […] a tinderbox in a Savile Row suit, a man who believed his childhood was so far behind him that all its threats had vanished” – makes his way along Piccadilly to sign copies of his latest book, a life of the painter Vermeer that the Financial Times has declared “a work of mesmerising empathy”.
Famously, almost nothing is known about Vermeer’s life; all we have is the art. We might say the same about Campbell. We are not sure who he is. There is only artifice, the performance of roles: husband, father, commentator, celebrity professor. In lifelong flight from his impoverished upbringing in Glasgow, he has made a career of surface, gesture and interpretation.
