David Sylvester’s posthumous London Recordings (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003), a collection of his writings and radio interviews, many of which with British artists of renown, has started all kinds of rumors among those in the know. Full of holes, it is believed to hide even more startling holes. For instance, the book contains none of his famous interviews with Francis Bacon, but a few of those close to Sylvester claim that the most dramatic of these was suppressed from the very start. Reportedly the last interview between the two, it has never been aired, published in full or in part, or even mentioned by the art critic in his writings. Only a handful of people have ever heard of the tape, let alone the tape itself. Its whereabouts are unknown, and it may have been destroyed. As the rumor goes, the critic’s penchant for long silences, dubbed “Sylvester pauses” by the pundits, that eventually cost him his job on the radio, apparently reached its apogee in the lost interview. Having started by confessing in a low and halting voice that he feared he was but a creation of a nation bereft of a great artist, but in dire need of one, and at any cost, Bacon ended by sobbing and weeping disconsolately while Sylvester just sat there. “There, there,” he droned from time to time. And that was all.