[Francis Bacon] seems an odd choice for Daphne du Maurier, with her fine wayward imagination and her gothic suggestiveness. Few Elizabethans had less of the mantic about them than Bacon; few steered a less infernal course…. Bacon was humdrum both in his grandeur and his decadence. He went meekly, if glumly, to his disgrace, arraigned as a Poulson and not as a Trotsky.

Yet some compulsion has drawn the author of Jamacia Inn, the biographer of Branwell Brontë, to this unlikely assignment…. [In writing The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, his Rise and Fall, her] feeling was that 'the ordinary reader … has never been sufficiently interested in, or understood, the extraordinary complexity of Francis Bacon's character and the many facets of his personality. The endeavour to explain him would be a challenge.' It is a challenge boldly taken up, with evidence of energetic reading, an orderly and consecutive...