This is an exhilarating book... The success Ross King achieved with Brunelleschi's Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling is repeated here, for he fashions history anew

A crowded canvas - like, say, Manet's Music in the Tuileries Gardens - full of diverse characters

A brilliant book, a micro-history that feels like a macro-history... A good read and a good history; an unusual a pairing as its twin subjects

Wonderfully rich... With great deftness [King] tracks the careers of both men in the decade leading up to the most important exhibition in the history of art, the Impressionist group show of 1874

It is, in its broad outlines, a familiar story, but King, the author of Brunelleschi's Dome, tells it with tremendous energy and skill. It is hard to imagine a more inviting account of the artistic civil war that raged around the Paris salons of the 1860s and 1870s, or of the outsize personalities who transformed the way the world looked at painting

King's book is an absorbing investigation into [Meissonier's] rise and fall, and while this alone would have been subject enough, the author opens up the canvas by interweaving the parallel fortunes of another artist, Edouard Manet... In King's careful hands this tale of two artists rises beyond a mere historical account to become a revealing investigation into the vagaries of taste and success

King's history of artistic rivalry and the stormy gestation of the Impressionist movement is a rich and textured read, full of the sounds and smells of Paris in a wild and exciting time

Startlingly frank.

Both tender biography and blunt revelation. In that it is the first to reveal the man and the essential symbiosis of heterosexual obsession…with the messy business of painting, it is the most important book yet written on Freud.

A riveting anecdotal portrait… Everywhere there are fascinating nuggets… A fond, fair-minded, thankfully non-judgmental and pretty full portrait of a person shaped around the people – and most saliently the lovers – who came into his life.

Greig has penetrated deep into the labyrinth of Freud’s private life. The result is a gripping page-turner about an endlessly fascinating and extraordinary man.

Compelling and fascinating… It is a book fill of clues – generous with routes to an understanding of this massively difficult and hugely gifted individual.

[It] will be on many an art lover's Christmas list this year.

Fond and faintly disturbing.

A rattlingly readable effort... Greig does a fine job revealing tales one suspects the artist may have wished to keep private.

Anybody with an ear for a good story, never mind an eye for fine art, will be beguiled.

Greig's fascinating, intimate biography of Lucian Freud was a revelation. Every question I had about Freud – from the aesthetic to the intrusively gossipy – was answered with great candour and judiciousness… Wry, dry and completely beguiling.

[Greig’s] perceptive observations and eagle’s eye for detail immediately drew me in.

The Freud who emerges in this account is a slippery figure, not only for journalists who tried to explain him but also for his intimates.

Mr Greig's is a compelling portrait of a complete amoralist who became a monstre sacré.

Greig’s portrait glimmers with his eye for the telling detail.

A mesmerising book, seamlessly crafted, totally absorbing, and impossible to put down.

A very readable and enjoyable book, full of salacious detail of the artist and his fascinating life.

This intimate biography of Lucian Freud spares no blushes in its account of one of Britain's greatest painters, tracing his life and work through candid revelations about his views on art, relationships and family.

Building up brush stroke by brush stroke, Greig has produced a three-dimensional study of equal candour. Part demon, part genius, it is an absorbing portrait of the complexity of a strange human character.

An unapologetic mixture of intelligent perception and high gossip... It is, overall, more revealing than anything about [Freud] yet written.

I am captivated by this fascinating memoir... It's an extraordinary read.

Candid and intelligent.

A gripping, page-turning vision of Lucian Freud that penetrates deep into the artist's private life.

Utterly engrossing and lavishly illustrated