Charles Darwent
Dog Days
A Painter’s Progress: A Portrait of Lucian Freud
By David Dawson
Jonathan Cape 272pp £35 order from our bookshop
In 1990 a young Welshman called David Dawson was taken to Lucian Freud’s house by his employer, the art dealer James Kirkman. ‘After that first meeting,’ Dawson recalls, Freud would ‘phone me every morning. A couple of weeks later he invited me round again.’ Kirkman’s assistant was to repeat his visit every day for the next six years. It was only in 1996 that Freud finally popped the question. ‘He asked me to sit for a painting,’ Dawson says in his new book, A Painter’s Progress.
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I have just spent a wonderful few minutes re-reading the best book review of the year in my opinion. It's by Piers Brendon in September's issue of @Lit_Review. Beautifully captioned as 'Jack the Lad', Brendon takes Fredrik Logevall's JFK: Vol.I apart! It's a laugh a minute. Ouch!
'Perhaps the real modern polymaths are the hidden ones who do not themselves grab the limelight but have the expertise to bring together different fields of knowledge: librarians, teachers, editors of literary journals…'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/masters-of-none
Jan Morris, who died last week, was a much-loved contributor to our pages. In 2017, she wrote a characteristically witty article about the different winds, their various personalities and how they had touched her life: https://literaryreview.co.uk/let-it-blow.