This is a record of the author’s many breakfasts with the artist Lucian Freud at Clarke’s restaurant, a few doors down from his Kensington Church Street house, amplified posthumously by many interviews with Freud’s friends, lovers, models and muses. It is a mesmerising book, seamlessly crafted, totally absorbing, and impossible to put down. There is at times an element of almost nauseating adoration, but it is seasoned by quotations from those Freud grievously emotionally wounded (who all too often came back for more). You would have to be totally uninterested in the human predicament to find it less than fascinating. The whole is a glittering mosaic of personal impressions, filtered through the sensibility of the author, who confesses he had stalked the artist since he