Exhibition of the week Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms

Tate Liverpool, Liverpool (0151-702 7400, www.tate.org). Until 18 September

Francis Bacon has become the “iconic artist de nos jours”, said Alastair Smart in The Daily Telegraph. Any museum exhibition of his paintings will “attract visitors by the lorryload”, and his “disturbed” and “isolated” works command “multiple millions” at auction: recently, one of his diptychs sold for $35m (£24m) at Sotheby’s. Indeed, Bacon’s legacy has been so thoroughly explored that you could be forgiven for thinking there was nothing left to say about his work. This “revealing” exhibition at Tate Liverpool sidesteps the problem by focusing on an often “neglected” technical aspect of his career – namely, the ghostly “transparent cages” he used to frame the figures in his compositions. The show brings together 30 paintings realised over the course of his career, and by concentrating on Bacon’s technique, reveals him to be a “much more considered artist” than his reputation as a “visceral, instinctive” painter might suggest. Prepare to discover a “Bacon of a very different flavour”.

Bacon was the “greatest painter in postwar Britain”, said Rachel Campbell-johnston in the Times. You wouldn’t guess it from this show, though. The exhibition features “only a few of the best” of his paintings. While 1944’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion – the triptych with which he established his reputation – still feels “frenzied and savage”, much of the work here is more of a “hammed-up mess than a sublimation of some visceral experience”. And on top of that, the focus on the “artificial structures” in Bacon’s paintings dulls the “untameable energy” of his work.

On the contrary, said Laura Cumming in the Observer, while the show’s theme may seem “odd” and even “unnecessary”, the paintings themselves are “deathless” and “inexplicable”. In Triptych (1967), we see bodies that appear “thrashed to a pulp” contained in a glass case, alongside a man in a telephone booth and an “anonymous” hotel room in which a “terrible bloodbath has apparently occurred”. Then there is an “outrageously sinister” painting of a child creeping round a circuit on hands and knees, and a “raw and screaming” figure of a woman based on the famous image of the nurse from the film Battleship Potemkin. Sometimes, Bacon’s work can even be quite funny: in one of his famous “screaming popes”, we see the pontiff “raising his dainty little hands in a fit of girlish horror”. Along with an accompanying show by Austrian painter Maria Lassnig, Tate Liverpool has delivered an “embarrassment of riches”.

The historian and novelist Ruth Dudley Edwards picks her favourite books about political violence and crime. Her new book, The Seven: the Lives and Legacies of the Founding Fathers of the Irish Republic, is published by Oneworld at £18.99

Unhappy the Land: The Most Oppressed People Ever, the Irish?

by Liam Kennedy, 2015 (Merrion Press £19.99). While debating the morality of the Irish 1916 rebellion, I’ve found inspiration in these witty and iconoclastic reflections on Irish history by a friend whose distinguishing features include deep humanity and mischievous enjoyment in dispatching sacred cows to the slaughterhouse.

James Connolly: My Search for the Man, the Myth and His Legacy

by Sean O’callaghan, 2015 (Century £18.99). This is by another friend who – inspired by the rhetoric of James Connolly (a Marxist executed after the

1916 rising) – joined the IRA at 15, and later devoted himself to destroying it. Here he writes about violent extremism and why ordinary people become True Believers.

J: A Novel by Howard Jacobson, 2014 (Vintage £8.99). A brilliant answer to those who ask why Jews don’t just forget about the Holocaust, this chilling dystopia is inhabited by people who have been enjoined to eradicate from their memories the catastrophe, referred to as “what happened, if it happened”.

This is London by Ben Judah, 2016 (Picador £18.99). Reportage at its best. An unsparing yet compassionate

look at London’s underbelly, where so many migrant poor hoping for Utopia are forced or tempted into crime.

The Golden Age of Murder

by Martin Edwards, 2015 (Harpercollins £20). Written by an admired crime writer, this is a superb reconstruction of how, in the 1930s and 1940s, a group of people in the Detection Club invented the modern detective story.

The Crime Wave at Blandings

by P.G. Wodehouse, 1936 (out of print). When life seems terminally gloomy, there is always Wodehouse to restore one’s joie de vivre. Here’s his priceless foray into violent crime.