“... commissioned by the BBC to make a Bayswater Road portrait of the queen for her eightieth birthday. Lucian Freud’s 2001 portrait is, on the other hand, simply a splodgy act of lèse-majesté. Over the past forty years the House of Windsor has made questionable attempts to proletarianise itself. Much of the best work has obviously been done by the ...”

“... on its subject-matter to achieve its effects – the claustrophobic spaces in the paintings of Lucian Freud for example. At the same time, lucidity of transcription (the common factor in work as various as Corot’s early landscapes, Watteau’s figure drawings, Degas’s pictures of women and Sickert’s music halls) is devalued by the supreme lucidity of ...”

“... rather pre-war friends, Cyril Connolly, Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender. She has an affair with Lucian Freud, she visits Oxford, becomes pregnant and marries into a more modern set: her husband, a friend of Ken Tynan and Kingsley Amis, has to be indoctrinated into her mother’s religion by the time-honoured Father D’Arcy, S.J. There are many more ...”

“... history followed, then a book on the GECs, articles on 18th-century Anjou, and a translation of Lucian of Samosata, the great debunker who lived under Marcus Aurelius and wrote in Attic Greek. But his latter years were spent back in the Gironde, writing the history of the local Resistance movement that he had led and fighting to ensure that the names of ...”

“... to construe the Greek testament … at sight … read any easy prose Greek author, as Xenophon, Lucian, Herodotus and also Homer … then all the usual common Latin schoolbooks … to read at sight Virgil, Horace, Caesar’s Commentaries … you should be able to write pretty correctly Latin prose – and a Greek play or two should be added. It was ...”

“... the person near the edge and leave the centre to a collection of books, a wheel, a dog. Here is Lucian Freud (1997) looking earnestly off-stage, sitting just inside the lower right corner of a photograph dominated by the rear view of the big canvas behind him. This invisible painting is set on an easel that seems to frame and crown the painter’s head; and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he particularly admired the ancient Epigrammatists, Simonides of Ceos, Callimachus, Meleager and Lucian. His interest in languages led him to read Yiannis Psiharis, the famous linguist and nationalist, who made fun of poets who used a hybrid of ancient and modern Greek vocabulary and said they should use the language people actually spoke. Cavafy’s ...”

“... would demand gifts from an artist whose work he was about to honour with a review – according to Lucian Freud, who knew Sylvester for decades, the expected rate was usually two pieces, which could be small as long as they were choice, for one article.’ This is all very shocking, the more so as it involves critics and curators at the top of their ...”

“... in his preface to Thucydides, stated that his opinions on history were largely formed by Cicero, Lucian, and the Notae to the Politics of Lipsius.’ Hobbes stated nothing of the kind. He merely cited those authors’ favourable estimates of Thucydides in support of his own judgment. The second assertion is: ‘The idea that freedom of thought is the ...”

“... Theocritus emerge sounding much the same. Everything begins to seem as if it had been rewritten by Lucian: simple, transparent and plain. Perhaps it is inevitable that translators from Greek, so anxious to open doors, will always over-translate, modernising old-fashioned vocabulary, shortening sentences, homogenising dialects and unravelling difficult ...”

“... Dei of Thomas Bradwardine’, the Polish poet Aleksander Wat, Milton (or, ‘Joannis/Miltoni’), Lucian, Erasmus, Sir Thomas More (‘Morus, humble and witty at the end’) and ‘the English Church,/the Church of Wesley, Newman, and George Bell’. Those last names, ‘Wesley, Newman, and George Bell’, incompatible figures who comprise several different ...”

“... The Faerie Queene would not have agreed), ‘but yet let no man thinke, that herein I stand with Lucian or hys develish disciple Unico Aretino, in defence of execrable and horrible sinnes of forbidden – unlawful fleshlinesse ... ’ Richard Barnfield, after allowing a lovesick Arcadian to pour out his passion for ‘Ganymede’ in The Affectionate ...”

“... needed renovation. With Erasmus, he translated the satirical and highly irreligious writer, Lucian, from Greek into Latin. He wrote, in 1518, that one should ‘build a path to theology’ through the great secular authors. He believed that the Church needed to be reformed, and spoke out against the clerical abuse that was turning the people against the ...”