This historical and art-critical study by Martin Gayford (b. 1952)—author of interview collections featuring David Hockney and Lucian Freud, as well as books on British art, Van Gogh, and Michelangelo—examines London painting from the 1950s to the 1970s. During this period, the innovations of Pop Art—with its obsession with the mass culture of a consumer society—became intricately intertwined with an existentially oriented Neo-Expressionism and a characteristically English interest in the materiality of paint. The author explores the work of leading British artists of the era—including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, R. B. Kitaj, and David Hockney—within the context of their aesthetic pursuits and the vibrant, bohemian life of "Swinging London."