I am ever grateful for the magnificent mentoring and warm friendship I receive from Andrew Ballantyne. Many of the thoughts herein were given air on a terrace that faces the Basilica of Sainte Marie-Madeleine in Vézelay. Thank you.
Sincere thanks to the University of Sydney for the award of a sabbatical during the period from which this book emerged. I must thank those who have kindly taken the time to read sections of this book and whose critique and commentary has refined many ideas and many more forms of expression: Claudia Perren and Miriam Mlecek, Andrew Leach and David Ellison, Hélène Frichot and Stephen Loo, Ian Buchanan, Michael Tawa, Victoria Jackson Wyatt, Farzane Haghighi, Sanja Mladenović, Kate King, Vesna Trobec and Kieran Richards.
Thanks to Liza Thompson and Frankie Mace, my editors at Bloomsbury, for their enthusiasm and support throughout. Thanks to Ella Mudie and the Estate of Francis Bacon; Giulia Leali and the Lucian Freud Archive; Paul Rousseau and the John Deakin Archive, and Julian Ridgway and Rosemary Croft from Getty Images, for generous help with the sourcing of images and for sharing magnificent minutiae. Thanks to Allison Collins and Peter Schneider for helping me to access Douglas Darden’s wonderful legacy. Thanks also to Joshua Bowler for identifying a figure in a double-exposed photograph that, even for a psychoanalyst, can’t have been entirely comfortable.
Heartfelt thanks to those who were with me throughout the intense pre-preamble and post-postscript of this book. Thank you to our four: Terence and Theo Triantafyllou, Byron and Liam Smith. And thank you to Jana Scheffler and Luke Kirchner-Scheffler, Kim Jacobs, Con and Soula Kazantzidis, Shirley Scanes, Lynda and Bill Smith, Ross Anderson and Marjo Niemelä for taking such good care of our family across our rawest moment.