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“... God that his sins do not include pride. He allows that dangerous authors like Machiavelli and Lucian should be kept from ‘common heads’ whose faith would be threatened by them, but knows his own to be no common head. He writes as one who has ventured among perilous ideas and returned unscathed, and displays his skill in managing his rebellious reason ...”

“... Pury has little to say about any particular work of art, other than a poor imitation of a Lucian Freud which he is proud to have commissioned. It shows him wearing a dark suit with Anh Duong – his girlfriend at the time – sprawled naked across his lap. Although de Pury modestly concedes that it would be an exaggeration to compare him to ...”

“... to say why I like the painting so much. It’s partly its austerity, which brings to mind some of Lucian Freud’s early portraits, while the sitter reminds me of Max von Sydow in The Seventh Seal. When I go through Room 12 it’s the painting I always glance at as if it were a friend. I haven’t got anything more to say about it than that, though, and I ...”

“... feel a bit rotten, as they often do, they like to compare themselves to figures in paintings by Lucian Freud. Like anorexic film stars and rock musicians writing their not-so-difficult fourth album, it appears that Kureishi’s characters are suffering from a low-key form of Paradise Syndrome. Relationships have become the main source of angst. Some, like ...”

“... plinth. Like something out of place and menacing, sticking its head through the wall in an early Lucian Freud painting. The questing sociologist has an agenda. She is our nominated surrogate in occupied territory. And she is persistent. She comes back until the required witnesses can be persuaded to share a drink and a stroll, to confess in safety, under ...”

“... to Hardwick’s apartment from JFK. There’s an irony in those last moments: Lowell in a taxi, Lucian Freud’s painting of Blackwood on his lap (he was seeing about having it appraised), caught between two women, suffering a heart attack.Hardwick​ began writing Sleepless Nights shortly after her separation from Lowell, describing it as the book that ...”

“... Levi called it the ‘grey zone’. In January, the IDF’s chief psychiatrist, Lieutenant Colonel Lucian Tatsa-Laur, claimed that an Israeli hostage held by Hamas would be ‘stripped of all his humanity and all of his being … you are starved, and you are also manipulated psychologically and physically.’ The US journalist Arwa Damon posted a remark by a ...”

“... of what we might call ‘real’ people – more real somehow than the people who sat for Lucian Freud. Her selecting real people who were, as Sontag would have it, ‘ugly’ or ‘genetic freaks’ or ‘pariahs’ and ‘miserable-looking’ was not nice; it may have told us as much about Arbus as a poor little rich girl filled with mischief as it ...”

“... with some reluctance – acceded to his superiors’ demands and replaced Lucas with Major General Lucian Truscott, formerly of the 3rd Division. ‘And I thought I was winning something of a victory,’ Lucas wrote in his diary that evening. It was a hurtful end for Corncob Charlie. Vaughan-Thomas reported on the new commander’s first press ...”

“... Swift as one of his own great literary masters, along with (and perhaps surpassing) Aristophanes, Lucian, Rabelais and Cervantes, was strong. In return, Swift is said to have admired Fielding’s wit and to have confessed that one of the only two occasions in his life when he remembered having laughed was ‘at the circumstance of Tom Thumb’s killing the ...”

“... to me in it.’ Blackwood, whose mother was the heiress Maureen Guinness, had been married to Lucian Freud and to the composer Israel Citkowitz; in 1970 she was seeing Robert Silvers, the editor of the New York Review of Books. Silvers had encouraged Lowell to be in touch with Blackwood during his time in England – ‘Would you like to see Caroline in ...”

“... of course, predecessors in this kind of moral fable. A classic Utopian tradition lies behind him (Lucian, More and Swift). And his story makes playful allusion to other more recent practitioners. If Amis’s book is, in fact, superior even to such refined and serious specimens of romance as Ray Bradbury’s short story ‘A Sound of Thunder’ or Keith ...”

“... well over fifty of them, covering a staggering range of figures and topics: Thucydides, Aristotle, Lucian, Quintilian, Origen, St Augustine, Dante, Boccaccio, More, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Bayle, Voltaire, Sterne, Diderot, David, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Warburg, Proust, Kracauer, Picasso and many more, each an extraordinary display of learning. No ...”