The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth 1922 - 1968

"It is. I mean the level of closeness, proximity to the subject that Feaver got is extraordinary. The level of detail about Freud’s life that he got is extraordinary. This book is kind of a biographer’s tale: biographers will admire it because of its level of engagement, but it also then becomes a broader story about the period, both in terms of location in Soho and in Bohemian London—and remember, this is Sigmund Freud’s grandson. At the beginning, this is the first part of his life. Freud’s family flees from the Nazis and you have a boy growing up in the shadow of his grandfather. He had things to say himself about family influences and their impact on people. So on one level, this is a story of analysis, but on another it’s just the rich tapestry of life that the artist inhabited in Soho and London in the forties, fifties and sixties. It’s very nicely written; the level of detail is absolutely fantastic. And in some ways, it’s not ostentatious about the subject. It doesn’t make grand cases for Lucian Freud as an artist. It just says, ‘Here is everything, the fabric of his existence, and therefore the fabric of lots of other existences around him,’ and delivers it in a very nicely organised, nicely written way. I think it allows the reader to conduct their own analyses of the subject. Because, like I said, it’s the level of detail; it’s an eye for a funny anecdote; it’s an apt quotation, lots of quotations; it’s not very judgemental. I don’t think it is an analysis in the way of a great Freudian figure placing his subject on the couch and drawing conclusions. That’s not how I read it. I find it much more a book by someone who wanted to weave together a person’s life, and does so by presenting beautifully turned, exhaustive detail about it. It’s the detail that sparkles out. Well, he was close to Freud. He spoke to him almost every day. He had absolute contact with Freud himself. As a result, there are lots of direct quotations in the book. This is someone who has a tremendous amount of contact with his subject, which I’m not sure is always true of biographers. And it’s a very readable book. That’s the other thing. I keep coming back to the idea of thrillers—not because that’s necessarily always the way to judge a great book, but because there is something compulsively readable about them. That, I think, is really important. This could have been a book about a great painter that was dry and academic, and it isn’t: it’s full of the blood and guts of his life. All the books that are on this list have a narrative force about them. You want to get to the end."