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"Another comment by Hockney about portrait-painting—“It’s a duration, not a moment”—might also be applied to the most important relationship in this book, between Freud and his biographer. As a young art critic Feaver first got to know Freud in 1973, and it wasn’t long before his life was caught up in the painter’s slipstream. They would talk regularly on the phone, sometimes more than once a day (“Hello, Villiam. How goes it?”), and as Feaver assembled a record of these conversations it seems that the notoriously private Freud gradually reconciled himself to the appearance of a biography in which he would not be analysed too much—throughout his life the ghost of his grandfather Sigmund continued to hang heavily over the family—and would usually be allowed the last word. "

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/the-lives-of-lucien-freud-william-feaver-review