Hostage To Fortune: Troubled Life of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) (Phoenix Giants S.) - Softcover

Simon Schama explains why this is one of his favourite books
Francis Bacon wanted to be remembered as the disinterested architect of a great system of scientific inquiry. But Jardine and Stewart’s wonderful biography demolishes his self-constructed posterity the better to give us the whole, exceptionally complicated man: the cocksure lawyer; the ingratiating Jacobean courtier, the political manipulator, eventually undone by his own over-confidence. If this doesn’t sound like someone you want to spend five hundred pages with, you’d be quite wrong, for Jardine and Stewart do a wonderful job in suggesting how low and high qualities co-exist within the same personality. And at his highest, Bacon was a peculiar sort of genius, whose many flaws act as foil for the real sharpness of his thought. To read this book is to be dropped into a world of brilliance and peril - and be reminded that the man who began as a shepherd’s grandson and ended as the impeached Viscount St Albans - had his share of both.

The fascinating life of Francis Bacon.