Peter Coleman launched Patricia Anderson’s Robert Hughes: The Australian Years in Sydney in December. It is with some excitement that I launch this biography of Australia’s most famous art critic and one of its most widely honoured—I almost said decorated—men of letters. It is at least two books. It is a biography, a life. But it is also a life and times book. It has several brilliant chapters on the social and artistic context of Bob Hughes’s Australian years—the galleries and dealers (Rudi Komon, Terry Clune, Barry Stern), the buyers and patrons (Major Harold de Vahl Rubin), the critics (Wallace…