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“... genres of portrait and nude. To combine these has always been provocative. Goya’s Naked Maja and Lucian Freud’s pictures of nameable naked people take some of their force from the subjects’ unexpected willingness to let themselves be exposed. Stanley Spencer’s portrait of himself and Patricia Preece naked with a leg of lamb, and Dürer’s drawing of ...”

“... subjects and purposes of European painting, is displayed the work produced by Francis Bacon and by Lucian Freud during the same decades – interiors, still-lives, nudes, portraits, in oil paint on canvas. Bacon’s paint, smeared and spattered on a routine flat preparation, suggests the calculated accident – not only chance effects with paint but terrible ...”

“... taught us to laugh in a new manner when he mingled together the anti-Christian Greek satirist Lucian, a Greek-writing St Paul, the earliest major Greek theologian (the controversial Origen) and the only Latin ever placed on the same level, Jerome. How far did Erasmus, with all this Greek and his knowledge of the Fathers, break the mould in which his ...”

“... she acquired the nickname ‘Dirty Nina’ – but she continued to meet artists, including Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, who admired her and her work. Where are these later drawings now? Lost? Sold for a drink or some spare change? Many years before, she had given away drawings by Modigliani and Gaudier-Brzeska, handing them out to strangers at the ...”

“... a less threatened way, Hockney has depicted himself (naked) in a pally face-to-face with Picasso. Lucian Freud did versions of Watteau and Chardin. Howard Hodgkin was an exuberant hommagiste, with offerings to Degas, Corot, Morandi, Matisse, Samuel Palmer, Ellsworth Kelly, Vuillard and Seurat. Such conversations are nourishing, necessary and ...”

“... poems kept coming, and by 1944 a Selected, The Glass Tower, came out, expensively illustrated by Lucian Freud. He got married to a woman called Priscilla Craig, whom he adored, they had a daughter, and his prosperous-looking figure in its well-cut suit stood out amid the squalor of Tambimuttu’s Poetry London offices. But in 1948 it all began to ...”

“... genres that take that power to the limits and then reveal its dangers: The True History by Lucian of Samosata (second century ad), is a delightful, exuberant concoction which, as its name implies, explodes its own claims with exuberant wit, dreaming up shenanigans, some of which, like the voyage to the moon, have come about, though not in the manner ...”

“... the Byzantine period, the novel of Achilles Tatius, and finally the dialogue on love attributed to Lucian. A short chapter about female homosexuality follows, and then we move on to the Roman period. The various sources are of very uneven value; theory and practice differed very greatly, even in the same place and at the same time; and some of the evidence ...”

“... Blackwood) by her second husband, a Polish musician. Caroline was married earlier to Lucian [sic] Freud and by her third marriage to the illustrious American poet, the late Robert Frost. Frost and Blackwood? It’s a nice idea, but really ... In the matter of self-accusation, though, Davie makes Lord Longford seem trivial. The Barnsley poet’s ...”

“... Jacobean and modern London. Again, this is defensible, given the extent to which the tragedy uses Lucian and Plutarch’s version of ancient Athens to throw a sceptical light on the early modern metropolis. The play’s unsparing account of credit, debt and dishonour, its disabused depiction of the way favour and friendship circulate in a male, homosocial ...”

“... case. Counsel for Dame Helen produced a list of literary tribades featured in works by Diderot, Lucian, Massinger and others: it was protested that even the Ancients couldn’t say what the women actually did. These judges can easily be made to seem absurd and literal-minded, as judges often can: one was anxious to know whether Jane Cumming had noticed any ...”

“... in the Comic Spirit. An atheist and a pagan whose mind had been formed by his readings of Plato, Lucian and Lucretius, he found Enthusiasm ‘unpractical’. He defended his moderation and his art by saying ‘we shall nevertheless find in the first place that every successive triumph, however perverted in its immediate consequences, has been a step ...”

“... wings of their own. As an emblem of hope the aviators might have adopted Menippus, who – in Lucian’s satirical Icaro-menippus – flew to Olympus by equipping himself with the wings he had torn from an eagle and a vulture. As a perilous warning they had Icarus, whose fate they normally shared. The aeronauts might have been animated by a different ...”

“... at the expense of style: the mix of earthiness and erudition that puts the novel in the company of Lucian, Juvenal, Swift and Sterne is jettisoned. The absence of proper editorial matter is regrettable too: the translator doesn’t even say which editions he worked from. The Thirty Years’ War represents an ‘unclean world’, from which Simple ultimately ...”

“... in the Roman Empire, producing such writers as the ‘golden-mouthed’ orator Dion of Prusa, and Lucian, who imagined going to the moon centuries before Jules Verne thought of it. ‘I began the writing of my Lives for the sake of others,’ Plutarch wrote, ‘but I find that I am continuing the work and delighting in it now for my own sake also, using ...”