Times Literary Supplement: Lucid and Engrossing
“Bacon’s life has long been a kind of myth, structured around signposts…Now, over 700 lucid and engrossing pages, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan retrace and distil this myth, adding facts to a figure whose celebrity became, in his lifetime, a carapace and remained as a death mask…The authors give the tale a fresh momentum, a feeling of life as it happened, rather than the chiaroscuro Life that became the foundation of Bacon’s persona and the mirror image of his art…One of the many marvels of Revelations is just how present and immediate Bacon is made to seem. Even as he ebbs away, we see and hear him vividly.”
James Cahill, “The Face of an Angel: Beyond the Myth of Francis Bacon,” The Times Literary Supplement, March 12, 2021