Sometime during the five hours he spent pinned in the wreckage of his car, grievously injured and delirious with pain, Robert Hughes was visited by Death. "He was sitting at a desk, like a banker. He made no gesture, but he opened his mouth and I looked right down his throat, which distended

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) to become a tunnel: the bocca d'inferno of old Christian art."

So Hughes begins his new memoir, Things I Didn't Know, quite literally with a bang. The accident took place in 1999 on a deserted road in Western Australia, where the eminent art critic, author and television personality (The Shock of the New, Goya) was making a TV series on his native country. Thanks to a passing Aborigine named Joe Fishhook, Hughes survived the crash. So did the three men in the car with which he collided head-on. Because it appeared that Hughes may have strayed over the center line, he was prosecuted for the crash (he got off lightly), sued by the prosecutor for defamation (he settled) and skewered in the Australian press for questioning the legal process (he never stood a chance). His many injuries have not entirely healed, but his critical eye remains intact. Who else could have looked Death in the face and seen a learned reference to medieval art?

In Things I Didn't Know, Hughes focuses that same informed, unsparing scrutiny on his life. He does not escape uninjured, confessing infidelities, drug trips and lapses of faith, confidence and good sense. He skips from the accident back to his comfortable Catholic boyhood in Sydney, Australia (his father was a successful lawyer) and a frighteningly rigorous education at nearby St. Ignatius' College, a Jesuit boarding school right out of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A dilatory student at Sydney University, he drew cartoons for an off-campus magazine and drank with the Sydney Push, a group of young swells that included future writers Germaine Greer and Clive James. "I would sport a black beret," he recounts, "and wear a black duffel coat over a black turtleneck sweater, which would render me indistinguishable, I thought, from leading existentialists like Albert Camus."

One day the magazine's editor fired the art critic, pointed at Hughes and yelled, "You're the cartoonist. You ought to know something about art. Good. Well, now you're the f__ing art critic." Hughes, in fact, knew little, and the subject was difficult to master at a time when there were no art history programs and only a single Picasso in all of Australia. So after faking it for a while he lit out for Europe, wandering from church to museum. That experience, he writes, gave him a first-rate education but forever ruined him for "the company of some oafish collector who just bought a Jeff Koons but thinks Parmigianino was a kind of cheese."

Hughes began freelancing art pieces for newspapers and magazines in London. There he met a lively Australian named Danne Emerson, got her pregnant and married her in 1967. But she preferred hard drugs and serial sex, giving Hughes a dose of the clap she picked up from Jimi Hendrix. Hughes fell into a hash-and-Scotch-fueled slough of pity and paranoia. A book on Leonardo da Vinci languished unfinished. A Time editor who had noticed his elegant freelance pieces phoned from New York one day in 1970 to offer a steady job, but Hughes drunkenly denounced the caller as a cia agent and hung up.

Fortunately for journalism, the editor rang back, and Hughes was the magazine's art critic for more than three decades. Things I Didn't Know ends shortly after that promising second call. Left largely untold is what happened next in Hughes' life: a breakdown, the suicide at age 34 of his sculptor son Danton, his happy third marriage to American artist Doris Downes and his rise as a celebrity art historian and author of, among other masterpieces, A Jerk on One End, a charming volume about his lifelong passion for fishing.

Clearly, another memoir is required. But first Hughes may have to finish the book on Leonardo and wrestle further with the demons that drove him to become such an implacable enemy of cant, mediocrity and the quiet life. Not even his near-death experience on that road in Western Australia could return Hughes to the faith of his childhood. But the rest of us can thank the God of St. Ignatius, Parmigianino and medieval art that, at a crucial point in the line of his life, there was a Fishhook to save him.

• DONALD MORRISON
• After a near-fatal car crash, legendary art critic Robert Hughes looks back on a most unquiet life