NY Times: Comprehensive and detailed
“The most comprehensive and detailed account of [Francis Bacon’s] life, and one that topples central pillars of the Bacon myth….The book makes use of one splendid improvisation of its own. At the end of each chapter, there is a close reading of one painting…Instead of embedding such sections into the life…the work is cordoned off by a little white space. The space is just a line or two, but it makes an argument against automatically using the art to read the life or the other way around. In a book of such ambition and scope, it is finally—and fittingly, for an artist so private about his work—the modesty of this claim, of what can be known, that is its most moving achievement.”
Parul Sehgal, “New ‘Revelations’ in the Life of Francis Bacon, a Master of Darkness and Distortion,” The New York Times, March 23, 2021