“... 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 ...”

“... or for ‘drooling over fleshy naked women’ with a ‘quite shocking lack of abandon’ (Lucian Freud). This leaves us grateful that the critic makes no attempt to describe what he admires in Schnabel’s pictures. But it is important to note that he makes no attempt. You can’t promote a star in showbiz or sport without some discussion of his or ...”

“... balls for her daughters may have been her sole maternal pleasure.) Blackwood’s first husband, Lucian Freud, painted her; Walker Evans photographed her; she was the dedicatee of Lowell’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The Dolphin. (Sample epithet for Blackwood: ‘baby killer whale’.) He was likely writing the poems while she was writing The ...”

“... brother Francis Fowler, to whom Modern English Usage is dedicated. They produced a translation of Lucian, the first Concise Oxford Dictionary and, in 1905, a hugely successful grammar book called The King’s English. When war broke out both brothers lied about their age and joined up, only to be frustrated in their desire to be sent to the trenches. Frank ...”

“... conventional dictum than he imagines. The same might be said of ‘everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says,’ which is also unfair to the painter, given that it sounds, out of context, like an absurd simplification of something his grandfather might have written. At its worst, this tendency becomes quite embarrassing, as when Ondaatje has Anna quote ...”

“... conceits, but outrageous alterations of fact. In his essay ‘The Way to Write History’, Lucian told a story about Aristobulus reading to Alexander himself a passage from his history, in which he described how Alexander defeated Porus, the Indian King, single-handedly, and felled an elephant with a single blow. The episode seems to have been the ...”

“... to their re-evaluation of the classical legacy. Wieland was a poet who translated Horace and Lucian and edited Germany’s leading literary journal, Der teutsche Merkur; Herder the writer of works on history and aesthetics whose collections of folk poetry were hugely influential; Schiller a poet and the leading playwright of his time; Goethe an ...”

“... of St Luke) himself have known any of the painter’s works at first hand. The satirist Lucian wrote an ekphraseis – a literary exercise in which a descriptive equivalent of a picture is attempted – of Apelles’ celebrated Calumny; Botticelli used Lucian’s description as the basis of an attempt to recreate ...”

“... diptych, he stripped off completely and had himself depicted unsparingly, back and front, as if by Lucian Freud. ‘No one had ever done this before,’ Rublack writes. Schwarz’s youth was already receding; he needed to work on his tone. In the last image of all, made when ‘I was 631/2 years and 25 days old,’ he appears dressed for the funeral of his ...”

“... a little A-level-style box-ticking about the portrait, his focused look recalling ‘the elderly Lucian Freud’, his younger face changed by the years he spent working with Francis Crick in California in the 1960s by day and hanging out with Thom Gunn and his friends by night. This association of ideas, familiar from magazine profiles, is too neat to be ...”

“... on Cole’) Only one piece, ‘The Artist as an Old Man’, describing a Lucian Freud self-portrait, seems more than throwaway. It ends:     He looks into his own eyes or it might be yours and his attack on the goods repeats the riddle or it might be answers it:      Out of the eater             came forth meat ...”

“... an acute sensitivity to Smith’s classical preferences, in particular his decided admiration for Lucian (c.120-180), a Greek satirist of pagan religiosity who used irony to deflate Stoic conceptions of providence. Stoicism currently looms large in interpretations of Smith, but Rothschild takes care to plot the limits of his ‘eclectic’ adherence to Stoic ...”

“... of arty glamour in Fitzrovia. She was the Euston Road Venus to William Coldstream, Victor Pasmore, Lucian Freud and other lovers who painted and adored her youth, her over-compensating fierceness of opinion, her looks and some mysterious sadness that she carried inside. She was an insecure, uneducated girl who glorified men who painted pictures and wrote ...”

“... emperor and his courtiers. As for Greece, there were surely mountebanks – Galen knew them and Lucian guyed them; and some Greek philosophers were more interested in money than in the metaphysics of morals – or so text after text charges. But it is quite another thing to assert that, in an examination of the sources of Greek endeavour, ‘the recurrent ...”

“... is it Marías’s taste or Nevinson’s which is expressed in the phrase ‘that sordid artist Lucian Freud’, or in sharing the news that ‘nothing else’ Umberto Eco wrote was ‘as successful as The Name of the Rose’? The whole novel is full of statements that seem like a pastiche of the very idea of saying something, and at one point the narrator ...”