What made Lucian Freud so irresistible to women?

Amedeo Modigliani thought Nina Hamnett, muse, painter, memoirist, had ‘the best tits in Europe’. She fell 40 feet from a window and was impaled on the basement railings. Not suicide. She was peeing out of the window, the shared lodging-house lavatory being too distant. On her deathbed, her breathing was like a harmonica. The collector Roland Penrose liked being tied up by a dominatrix, a woman wrestler, whom he and his photographer wife, Lee Miller, brought to England and shared. The busy philosopher A. J. Ayer was known as Juan Don. When Isabel Rawsthorne finally had sex with the persistent, overweight sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, she reported that it was ‘exhausting’. She had to do all the work. Auden predicted that his last words would be: ‘I’ve never done this before.’ Michael Tree, who married Anne Cavendish, the Duke of Devonshire’s daughter, was a rattle known as Radio Belgravia — which might be an appropriate subtitle for The Lives of Lucian Freud.

These selected snippets of gossip, however interesting, are, you might think, peripheral to the life of Lucian Freud. But they tell us something crucial about the first volume of William Feaver’s biography. It is also an autobiography — written up from tapes and daily, noted, telephone conversations with his subject. Freud, who in his lifetime had a reputation for discretion and was litigious if his privacy was encroached on, was an unstoppable gossip. ‘How old am I now?’ he would ask. And that is a chronological question the reader is also liable to ask in the spate of non-stop disclosure.

As a biographical method, the rewards are obvious. Who but a prig doesn’t want to know that Francis Bacon once semi-publicly sucked off an unconscious, superbly endowed workman in a side room of the Colony Room Club? (The man vomited as he came.)