Adrian Scarborough reads Michael Peppiatt's intimate and very indiscreet account of his thirty-year friendship with the defining artist of our time.

Michael Peppiatt met Francis Bacon in June 1963 in Soho's French House to request an interview for a student magazine. Bacon invited him to lunch, and over oysters and Chablis they began a friendship and a no-holds-barred conversation that would continue until Bacon's death in 1992.
For decades, Peppiatt accompanied Bacon on his nightly round of prodigious drinking from grand hotel to louche club and casino, witnessing all aspects of Bacon's 'gilded gutter life'. And despite the chaos Bacon created around him Peppiatt managed to record scores of their conversation, and here he shows Bacon close-up, grand and petty, tender and treacherous by turn, and often quite unlike the myth that has grown up around him.
Today: death, guilt and inspiration.
Reader: Adrian Scarborough
Writer: Michael Peppiatt is an art historian, curator and writer. His 1996 biography of Francis Bacon was chosen as a 'Book of the Year' by the New York Times.
Abridger: Richard Hamilton
Producer: Justine Willett. Show less