Washington Post: Bejeweled with sensuous detail
“Stevens and Swan are excellent investigators, presenting novel details of Bacon’s early affairs, his short-lived interior-design career and the two years he spent in Hampshire during World War II, when asthma forced his retreat from London. The book is bejeweled with sensuous detail. . . . Bacon once said that telling his life story ‘would take a Proust.’ A tall order — though Stevens and Swan do share a Proustian eye for the social whirl and the encroachments of ‘time and the wrecking ball’…One of the achievements of Revelations is to capture this social change alongside the life of its subject. It’s a portrait of vanished worlds, of a 20th-century style of darkness now past. Our fresh horrors await new geniuses.””
Charles Arrowsmith, “Francis Bacon was an elusive figure. A new biography presents novel details of his iconoclastic existence,” The Washington Post, March 31, 2021.