BIOGRAPHIES
THE PRIVATE LIFE OF LORD BYRON by Antony Peattie (Unbound £35, 480 pp)
DON’T be daunted when you first pick up this doorstopper, weighing in at 2kg. A quick flick shows it’s loaded with sumptuous illustrations that take up vast swathes of its pages.
This is not a cradle-to-grave biography of Byron but a selection of snapshots of various quirky aspects of his life, such as his eating disorder, his obsession with Satan, his hero-worship of Napoleon, his dog and his mania for boxing.
‘Anorexia heroica’, Peattie calls Bryon’s eating disorder. A typical day’s intake, when not in love, was one thin slice of bread for breakfast, a light lunch of vegetables and seltzer water, and a cup of green tea for supper.
‘ Dieting was a heroic endeavour to free the spirit from the flesh,’ Peattie writes. When he was in love, the poet would binge and grow fat and then loathe himself. He found pregnant women a turn-off.
Peattie suggests that much of this weirdness stemmed from Byron’s sense of isolation caused by his limp, his Scottish accent and the early death of his father which caused a lifetime of father-hunger.
THE LIVES OF LUCIAN FREUD: VOLUME I: YOUTH by William Feaver (Bloomsbury £35, 704 pp)
I WAS very much on the side of those wives and girlfriends immortalised in oils by Lucian
Freud, gazing bleakly out of the canvas, their self- esteem clearly plummeting by the minute, as I read this fascinating and revealing biography of Lucian Freud by art critic William Feaver.
He recorded hours and hours of conversation with Freud, so we have rambling torrents of recollections straight from the great man’s lips.
Great man? Great artist, certainly; but his callousness comes across on every page.
He wasn’t even nice to his family, loathing his brothers and visiting his parents only when he needed money.
To his WAGs ( two wives, numberless girlfriends) he was all ardour and seduction until they fell madly in love with him, at which point his passion cooled.
Freud’s parallel cravings for the high life and the low life make for a rollicking read.
He’s hobnobbing with the Duchess of Devonshire one minute, and the next he’s rushing off to a betting shop to lose a painting’s-worth of money on the 2.30 at Kempton.