This first volume of The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth, which takes Freud up to 46, reads like fiction. Freud is Just William, Casanova, Barry Lyndon, Tom Jones and Pinkie ... The pace of the telling is frantic, propulsive and twitchy. Freud and Feaver seize you by the elbows, bundle you into a Bentley, haul you round the nightclubs, feed you oysters, Guinness and amphetamines and order you Russian tea and eggs the next morning. I didn’t know whether I’d been roughed up or ravished. As lives of artists go, this is up there with Michael Holroyd’s Augustus John and John Richardson’s Picasso ... The humour is black and slapstick, punning and perverse. Feaver allows Freud’s quotes to run at length. We hear his voice in interview transcripts...and showing off on the back of postcards. His talk was a mix of barrow boy and GI ... How much to believe? Freud went in for his own legend. One suspects a spot of mythmaking ... Feaver...writes of the paintings — of light, line, flesh and skin — with brilliant insight ... as his crony and co-conspirator Francis Bacon said: 'You’re never bored with Lucian.'

... fiercely detailed ... A cast of thousands troops through these antic pages, filling out both the professional side of Freud’s life, a steady rise in renown for long stretches stubbornly unaccompanied by a commensurate rise in income, and the personal side, filled with women who were often simultaneously attracted and repulsed by the artist ... Nobody alive today is in a better position to write an enormous, definitive biography of this artist. Feaver talked with Freud ind-depth on a wide range of topics for decades, he’s infinitely knowledgeable about Freud’s life and associates, and, as his frequent digressions demonstrate, he’s a richly rewarding thinker on Freud’s art ... Because of Feaver’s intimate connection with Freud, the book is positively suffused with the artist’s voice, commenting wryly on everything, all the time. This makes for singularly absorbing reading regardless of what any reader might personally make of Freud’s art itself.

...[a] sparkling first volume ... Feaver knew Freud for many years before his death...and although the painter was averse to the idea of a biography, he nevertheless gave him his approval. Their conversations ranged widely and Feaver wrote them up immediately afterwards, resulting in an extraordinary tranche of anecdote and aperçu ... It is through innumerable...vivid details that Feaver’s wonderful biography comes close to Freud’s own definition of his art: 'A picture should be a recreation of an event rather than an illustration of an object.'

It is rare that a subject’s voice rings so clearly through his own biography, and its salty, bragging, screw-you tone, its barbed humour and sudden darts into seriousness, fleet as a fish, are among the main pleasures of this book ... The book’s method soon becomes clear: a giant up-piling of quotes and anecdotes, random or fabulous, slightly indiscriminate but hugely entertaining, biographer and subject in a sort of collusion to create the legend ... there is the sense, well conveyed by Feaver, of how viscerally Freud’s more significant women were bound into the growth of his practice as an artist ... As the art gets going in earnest — and Feaver is good on the chilly, ruthless seriousness that Freud brought to his work — the writer’s deep background as a critic shines through, although his incisive understanding of the paintings is sometimes riffed rather fruitily and indulgently ... In this book, though never shirking the facts that would have made Freud a monster of the #MeToo era, Feaver remains resolutely unjudgmental ... The chief point of writing the life of an artist is to trace the threads of experience and influence that formed the mature works we know. In this baggy, indulgent, often highly enjoyable book, those threads can get snagged on detail, tangled in digressive anecdote. It could, should, have been cut by at least a third. But where would be the fun in that?

... gossipy, enthralling and sometimes appalling ... Along with all sorts of biographical detail, this book captures the age in which Freud lived during the first half of his long life, perhaps so well that the broader cultural portrait comes close to eclipsing its principal subject. Still, he is never far from view ... Though Mr. Feaver’s chronicle drops more names than a misplaced phone book, Freud’s nasty charm is addictive and irresistible ... One could say that The Restless Years, with its vivid anecdotes and rakish candor, is a kind of collaboration between Freud and Mr. Feaver—an amalgam of two kinds of 20th-century confessional: the diaries of European disintegration, like those of Count Harry Kessler or Victor Klemperer ; and the very English social diaries of Chips Channon or Alan Clarke. This was the double nature of Freud’s life.

Freud died in 2011 and the amount of first-hand information available about his antics means that Feaver could easily have written a book filled to the brim with gambling sprees and babies, as well as egocentricity, carelessness, fecklessness and an interest in danger. And while he has indeed filled his book to the brim with the excitement and strangeness of Freud’s life, he sees him as painter rather than playboy ... Feaver has a vivid sense of the sheer amount of time Freud spent in the studio and the determination and independence of mind that kept him charged. He is alert to the idea that the energy Freud spent on his work spilled over into the night, into sexual adventures, gambling binges, social climbing (up and down) ... does the fact that Freud was a genius excuse his behaviour? Feaver sidesteps this question, letting us know what happened without becoming a moralist. He remains sober, balanced. He uses his extensive interviews with Freud subtly and judiciously ... Feaver’s book shows how easily Freud could have become someone else: a painter of society portraits, for example, if he had been willing to soften his style ... It is fascinating, having read his book, to open a catalogue of Freud’s work and to see portraits of Kitty Garman, Caroline Blackwood, Charlie Lumley, Jane Willoughby, the artist’s mother – the whole cast of characters. Knowing how Freud met these people and when he painted them and who they were adds enormously to the interest in looking at the work. But no matter what we know or don’t know, the paintings hold their strength, their mystery, their distance. Freud, too, in Feaver’s version, maintains his own strength, his mystery, his distance. His biographer makes no effort to delve into his inner being and explain his work accordingly. Freud’s outer being gives him more than enough to go on.

... intricate, densely textured ... Taken from numerous interviews with Feaver, in person or by phone over a period of many years, Freud’s voice is a startling, almost uncanny constant through the book, a ghostly commentary. His evident honesty is impressive, even if his recall is inevitably subjective.

William Feaver has been thinking about this life for decades ... Feaver was more interested in getting things down than making them up; with dictaphone stretched to the limits, he had the most superlative material – and he was bound to it. Large tracts of what we have here are Freud by Freud ... Neither Freud nor Feaver go looking for causes; both avoid the methods of grandfather Sigmund ... Feaver lets non-sequiturs produce their own effect. There’s some fine judgment in the way he does this. Early on, I puzzled at the disparate events held together in paragraphs. In the teeming chapters of incident I kept expecting the arrival of a controlled narrative, questions posed and resolved, significant others brought sharply into focus. This biography does not work like that. So what is Feaver doing? ... [Freud's] was not a linear view of life, concerned with connections and continuities. To an extreme extent, he acted on impulse, barely connecting one moment with the next. Every page of this volume affirms the distinction. No course of action on a Saturday (even marriage) affected his choice of what to do on Tuesday and Wednesday. Feaver replicates this episodicism in telling the life story. This is Lucian Freudian biography, packed with momentary stories and fundamentally resisting narrative ... readers will reach their own views about the monstrous selfishness of the artist whose art is nonetheless a kind of gift. Feaver won’t tell you what to think about it.

With Freud’s approval, Feaver...spent decades recording their conversations, which now supply his book with so many of Freud’s first-person recollections that it reads like a hybrid biography-memoir, their voices blending like the layered chatter in an old Robert Altman movie and the story advancing on great swells of gossip spiked with vintage British slang ... To be sure, the gossip is choice ... In life, Freud could be languidly elusive about himself, his own Artful Dodger, and in Feaver’s 600-plus pages he somehow manages to stay that way ... Feaver’s treatment of Freud isn’t hagiographic, but weirdly hands-off. Even when he reports Freud’s worst behavior, it’s typically without so much as a cocked eyebrow, not even when Freud bangs a woman’s head into a table during an argument.

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 ... The drawbacks are repetition, obscure chronology, tangled confusion in the telling — often quoted directly — and lack of explanatory annotation. On the one hand, first-hand, hand-held authenticity; on the other, a slight uncertainty and sometimes a yen for something more sober, something clearer ... here, Freud gets to tell his version of events with patchy panache.

... we were being invited, like punters inspecting the goods at some grand house-contents sale, to poke about in [Freud's] defiantly unconventional, unscrupulously promiscuous, doggedly ambitious and tenaciously artistic life ... What could be more riveting? I don’t want to suggest that this biography is like a rummage through the metaphorical knicker drawer. It is too lofty for that ... the first part of Feaver’s account, with its sweeping great chunks of reported speech, of reminiscence, anecdote and opinion, had more of the feel of a picaresque novel than would normally be expected of a biographical work. This lent it an air of immediacy and I, for one, was eager to press on to the second part of the tale. Freud may have presented a tantalising unknowable figure in his lifetime, but surely after reading two chunky volumes I would have got to the bottom of his character? How wrong. The more I read, the less I felt I knew about this man ... The sorts of stories that involve peers of the realm, parrots and Dom Pérignon give way to the dramas of palette and paint ... This volume will appeal to those readers more fascinated by the artistic than the social life; who want a behind-the-scenes account of Freud’s succession of gallerists (and his rows and fallings out with them), of the critical opinions of his work (and why they were wrong), of the staging of progressively more significant exhibitions ... You won’t find out much of what Freud’s sitters thought of him. Nor is Feaver prepared to unsettle his subject with searching questions. Plenty of self-justifications are offered ... although you will sometimes be offered behind-the-scenes glimpses, more often you will be left with an overflow of never posed and so never answered questions ... Freud ruled like an emperor inside the artistic fortress that he created. But reading this book I found myself unexpectedly discomforted. The more that I read, the more the unsaid seemed to make its presence felt. It was increasingly disconcerting. Quite possibly it was because this biography has been published in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the Me Too movement. So many women seemed to have been led to sacrifice on the high altar of his talent. I tapped into an aura of creepy complicity. And, having finally got to the end of 1,000 pages, I suspect it will not prove the definitive biography. There’s more to come.

Art, debauchery, nightlife, and lowlifes fill out this rollicking biography of the celebrated British painter ... The result is a riotously entertaining narrative that immerses readers in Freud’s beguiling sensibility.