"The critic Kenneth Tynan divided playwrights into two categories, 'smooth' and 'hairy,' and one could probably make a similar distinction among biographers."

"Smooth biographers offer clean narrative lines, well-underscored themes, and carrots, in the form of cliffhangers, to lure the reader onward. Their books are on best-seller lists. They’re good gifts for Dad. William Feaver, the author of 'The Lives of Lucian Freud'... exists on the opposite extreme. There’s little smoothness in him at all. His biography is hairier than a bonobo.... Lucian and his furious id would have made an interesting case study for his grandfather. The artist was amoral: violent, selfish, vindictive, lecherous.... He had at least 14 offspring he acknowledged as his own. He called himself 'one of the great absentee fathers of the age.' Soon there are grandchildren as well. Freud did not do much hugging, but his progeny could tap him for money. Many got to know him by sitting for portraits. He painted his daughters naked. 'They make it all right for me to paint them,' he said. 'My naked daughters have nothing to be ashamed of.' Freud had a mean word for everyone.... If he didn’t like you, he cut you from his life like cancer. You can always tell a monster: He wears scarves indoors."

From "The Devilish Life and Art of Lucian Freud, in Full Detail" by Dwight Garner (NYT).

The biography is a 2-volume thing, and Volume 2 just came out. In posing this question about whether you could just start with Volume 2, Garner reveals a shocking ignorance of the power of Google: 

When "Clement" suddenly appears in Volume Two, with no surname attached, will every reader know this is Clement Freud, Lucian’s estranged brother? 

Who capable of reading a big hairy biography wouldn't just google the words Lucian Freud Clement? It gets you right to a Wikipedia article on Clement Freud.

The grandson of Sigmund Freud and brother of Lucian Freud, he moved to the United Kingdom from Germany as a child.... He worked at the Nuremberg Trials and in 1947...  He married June Flewett (the inspiration for Lucy Pevensie in C. S. Lewis's children's series The Chronicles of Narnia).... Freud was one of Britain's first "celebrity chefs"... He appeared in a series of dog food advertisements (at first Chunky Meat, later Chunky Minced Morsels) in which he co-starred with a bloodhound called Henry (played by a number of dogs) which shared his trademark "hangdog" expression. 

Too much information, if anything. Bark, and Google scoops it into your bowl. Chunky Meat, later Chunky Minced Morsels indeed! Not only will every reader know this is Clement Freud, Lucian’s estranged brother. Every reader will know that the dogfood Chunky Meat was rechristened Chunky Minced Morsels.

AND: In case you're wondering if Wikipedia covered Clement's estrangement from Lucian, the answer is (of course) yes: "Freud died without resolving a feud with his brother Lucian, thought to have dated back 70 years, over which of them was the rightful winner of a boyhood race." 

What's the most absurd estrangement in your family?

ALSO: The NYT book reviewer misses the Biblical reference in that hairy/smooth business: "But my brother Esau is an hairy man, but I am a smooth man."

A famous comic bit from 1964 probably predates Kenneth Tynan's observation: Video here. 

AH, YES: Here's Tynan, writing in The New Yorker in 1977, "Withdrawing with Style from the Chaos": 

[The playwright Tom] Stoppard often puts me in mind of a number in “Beyond the Fringe,” the classic English revue of the sixties, in which Alan Bennett, as an unctuous clergyman, preached a sermon on the text “Behold, Esau my brother is an hairy man, and I am a smooth man.” The line accurately reflects the split in English drama which took place during (and has persisted since) this period. On one side were the hairy men—heated, embattled, socially committed playwrights, like John Osborne, John Arden, and Arnold Wesker, who had come out fighting in the late fifties. On the other side were the smooth men—cool, apolitical stylists, like Harold Pinter, the late Joe Orton, Christopher Hampton (“The Philanthropist”), Alan Ayckbourn (“The Norman Conquests”), Simon Gray (“Otherwise Engaged”), and Stoppard. Earlier this year, Stoppard told an interviewer from the London weekly Time Out, “I used to feel out on a limb, because when I started to write you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. . . . ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ is important, but it says nothing about anything.” He once said that his favorite line in modern English drama came from “The Philanthropist”: “I’m a man of no convictions—at least, I think I am.” In “Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon” (1966), Stoppard’s only novel to date, Mr. Moon seems to speak for his author when he says, “I distrust attitudes because they claim to have appropriated the whole truth and pose as absolutes. And I distrust the opposite attitude for the same reason.” Lord Malquist, who conducts his life on the principle that the eighteenth century has not yet ended, asserts that all battles are discredited. “I stand aloof,” he declares, “contributing nothing except my example.” In an article for the London Sunday Times in 1968, Stoppard said, “Some writers write because they burn with a cause which they further by writing about it. I burn with no causes. I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.” On another occasion, he defined the quality that distinguished him from many of his contemporaries as “an absolute lack of certainty about almost anything.”