DDM has definitely piqued my interest in Sir Francis Bacon. Have added his essays and New Atlantis to my ever growing TBR. Du Maurier definitely is overlooked as a biographer. I only wish she would've produced more.

It took some skimming, but I've finally finished [The Winding Stair] by du Maurier. I read the introduction by Francis King after I finished and wondered if we had read the same book? My thoughts are almost the exact opposite of King's. I found it plodding, obscure and dancing around Bacon and who he was with all sorts of tidbits from his times but no meat to tell me about him and why he was thought to be such a great man. Perhaps the book was written with the expectation that the reader would already know all that? The author seems to expect that the reader will have read his [Essays] and his letters. I feel that I could have learned more to the point by reading Wikipedia. That being said, don't let me keep you from reading this if you have an intense desire to know all the petty political ins and outs of the court of King James and London of the early 1600s. One thing I did find interesting, was that Sir Francis Bacon started a story called [New Atlantis], which has shades of [[Jules Verne]] and [[Robert Lewis Stephenson]] almost 200 years before they were born. ( )