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“... irredeemably prosaic, and it would be difficult to gauge from his description that the satires of Lucian are funny. Bernstein’s stated aim is to discover how the idea of a fearful hell got its hold on people; but it is impossible to answer that question by brief and disembodied resumés of secular and sacred texts. We do not even know whether or to what ...”

“... but gradually the balance shifted towards painters and writers (in the first instance, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Peter Quennell, who was known – someone had to be – as ‘Lady Rothermere’s fan’): Mr Amory cites this as evidence of her capacity to ‘develop’, and however off-putting a notion, it may be true. Rothermere with his ...”

“... is mocked by Martial, the self-immolation of the philosopher Peregrinus meets similar treatment in Lucian and the jurist Ulpian criticised Stoic suicide as a form of ostentatious self-display, iactatio. Similarly, Tacitus dismisses the political suicides of Domitian’s era as ambitiosa mors, self-advertising deaths, while Marcus Aurelius argues that one’s ...”

“... very close to poverty [were] inextricably combined’. All four at some point shared a bed with Lucian Freud; at least three of them slept with Arthur Koestler; and two of them married Derek Jackson, who had previously been married to Pamela Mitford and would eventually tot up six marriages.Before I go on, I want to mention a paradox that I’d like someone ...”

“... change of style from dry to wet, from small marks to big ones, is not unique or even unusual. Lucian Freud, for example, has changed from thin paint, small brushes and fine detail to thick paint broadly applied. There is a kind of release in this; finicky marks give way to bigger, firmer strokes and painterly paint. It is not necessarily easier, but it ...”

“... He agrees with other scholars that Augustan satire gets much of its vitality from its relation to Lucian and Juvenal, Rabelais and Erasmus, Scarron and Cervantes, but he emphasises its nearer relation to ‘the actualities of 18th-century life’. He is far less concerned with the history of ideas than with ...”

“... to Zeus, but Zeus by that time held far less sway than when Phidias had created his statue. Lucian, a contemporary of Herodes, noted in one of his satires that poor Zeus had been unable to prevent a temple robber from shearing off some of the gold-plated locks of his effigy’s hair. Barringer’s survey comes to a close with the Theodosian decree of ...”

“... is sometimes one of influence, more usually one of semi-private conversation across the centuries (Lucian Freud doing versions of Chardin, Hodgkin painting ‘After Corot’). But it also goes beyond that – beyond admiration, beyond style, homage, imitation. Van Gogh, even as he was violently wrenching himself towards a form of painting which still startles ...”

“... documentary about him.* The film was shown in the presence of the governor-general, who wore a St Lucian blue twinset. Alongside her was a quintet of elderly musicians performing dusty calypsos, their sockless feet in smart black shoes. For several years now, a number of Walcott’s friends, family and old students have travelled across the world to wish him ...”

“... sculpture. Clark’s enthusiasms, whether for the earliest work by Victor Pasmore or the young Lucian Freud, were never influenced in the slightest by that fear of being slow to greet the latest fashion which has guaranteed academic support for all new brands of contemporary art in recent decades. He was unusual also in believing that the merits of modern ...”

“... parcel Lowell had with him: it was Girl in Bed (1952), a portrait of the 21-year-old Blackwood by Lucian Freud, her first husband. Although, according to Hamilton, Lowell had brought the portrait to New York to be valued, Meyers sees things symbolically: Lowell was ‘unable to decide which woman he wanted to live with and unwilling to let go of ...”

“... of events’.From William Orpen dressing up as Chardin, Jean Cooke’s domestic psychodramas to Lucian Freud’s wall of rags and sinister spider plants, the mix of the banal and the bizarre in studio pictures is often what makes them interesting. Last year the Orangerie in Paris held a retrospective of the work of Sam Szafran, a Parisian painter born to ...”

“... established himself in places such as the French House and the Colony Room, and he became close to Lucian Freud, thirteen years his junior. Freud bought work from Bacon, including Two Figures (1953), a depiction of two naked men on a bed passionately engaged in sex, which Freud kept opposite his own bed, generally refusing to lend it out to ...”

“... Brian Aldiss’s Forgotten Life has a strikingly good dust-jacket. The front reproduces Lucian Freud’s Interior with plant, reflection listening (self-portrait), a picture of the painter, ear cupped, looking through the foliage of a spider-grass plant, foreshortened to the size of a huge jungle tree. The back has a photograph of Aldiss, whisky ...”

“... says, in Thomas Balogh’s sense, not Arthur Lewis’s. (‘Tommy,’ the distinguished St Lucian economist is reported to have said, ‘the difference between your socialism and mine is that when you think of socialism you think of yourself as behind the counter, whereas when I think of socialism, I think of myself as being in front of it.’) The ...”