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“... Where earlier painters used Muybridge’s photographs to get the detail of their paintings right, Francis Bacon, drawn to their impersonal, objective quality, made subjects of, for example, Muybridge’s wrestlers. Meissonnier wanted a crib; Bacon had found a source. The frozen moment has now become a commonplace. In ...”

“... to John Ogilby’s county survey; answering Anthony Wood’s hail of questions (‘What is Francis Potter’s epitaph? When and where did Dr John Godolphin die?’) as Wood prepared his history of Oxford University. There could be a guileless enthusiasm to Aubrey that meant he was often betrayed: when Wood’s Athenæ Oxonienses was published in ...”

“... of a woman who is evasive, assertive and contrary. She would have agreed, I think, with Francis Bacon, who once said in an interview that he wanted ‘to give the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance. And the moment the story enters, the boredom comes upon you.’ Leslie Fiedler found another kind of boredom in Pilgrimage, one he ...”

“... of the credit crunch. Yet the estimates were higher than ever, masterpieces by Gerhard Richter and Francis Bacon were on offer (‘estimates on request’) and the saleroom was full to bursting. There’s an enforced indignity to the occasion, expensive coats thrown over the backs of cheap chairs, no discernible hierarchy between bidders and dealers and ...”

“... say, meaning ‘he’s barmy,’ but it certainly kept him happy.7 February. Ploughing on with the Francis Bacon biography, a depressing book with the regular critiques of Bacon’s work, particularly by David Sylvester, often hard to understand. So much drink in the book that I wonder, had I liked drink more, would it ...”

“... account of the limits of science, or mostly the lack of them, as perceived by great thinkers from Francis Bacon to Karl Popper and himself. His arguments are couched in largely epistemological terms which do not arouse my passions, but they stimulated me to think about those limits that affect laymen’s attitudes to science, about the practical limits ...”

“... age. (These instincts mean that here in Britain, we can’t help but view Soutine through Francis Bacon spectacles.) A nameless Parisienne occupies a 1929 canvas in hieratic centrality, and yet the paint textures here are mobile and deep: her sad eyes summon from Soutine a performance as respectful of European high tradition as anything in ...”

“... even scientists did work that helped painters (had they been able to look forward from Eakins to Francis Bacon, they would have found that they had succeeded, if not quite in the way they expected). The particular kind of ‘truth’ revealed by the scientists’ cameras – does a galloping horse ever have all its feet off the ground at the same ...”

“... He not only envied visual artists, he believed in their power. ‘I didn’t see exhibitions of Francis Bacon, Max Ernst, Magritte and Dalí as displays of painting,’ he wrote in 2003. ‘I saw them as among the most radical statements of the human imagination ever made, on a par with radical discoveries in neuroscience or nuclear physics.’ In ...”

“... political and military to examine all that was left of the material past. ‘Whatsoever,’ as Francis Bacon had put it, ‘singularity, chance and the shuffle of things hath produced,’ old coins, flints, armour, pottery and bits of parchment, these were the antiquaries’ stock in trade. Gathered like anatomists around the society’s table they ...”

“... We Should Note,’ Francis Bacon enjoined in his Novum Organum, ‘the force, effect, and consequence’ of three inventions which were unknown to the ancients, ‘namely, printing, gunpowder and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and state of the whole world.’ Since Bacon’s time almost everyone has agreed that the social and cultural impact of printing must have been huge ...”

“... devaluation of all three (and much besides) since the Enlightenment: civilisation ruined thanks to Francis Bacon, Rousseau, Hume, Comte, Marx, Bergson, William James, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Gramsci, Rowan Williams, Richard Dawkins, liberation theologians, Princess Diana, Professor Nutt, someone called Matthew Fox, Madonna, Cherie Blair – and Barack ...”

“... at the visceral facts goes deep. Soutine’s paintings of bird and animal carcases, and others by Francis Bacon (like Figure with Meat, Velázquez’s Innocent X backed by sides of beef), draw on these responses. Decorative food – game trophies, horns of plenty – often doesn’t have much to do with eating. Who would dare destroy the arrangement by ...”

“... for real. Wyndham Lewis is a good example of the first; Gorky and de Kooning of the second. Francis Bacon started, so the Tate show demonstrates, as a diligent – too diligent – student of the second kind, battling away at the enigma of Cubist space; he failed to solve it; and where he ended up is another matter.) The question remains why. What ...”

“... now. In straw polls he is in everyone’s top three. Unexpected people turn out to have been fans: Francis Bacon liked his brushwork. It was not always so. ‘Pierre Bonnard. Is he a Great Painter?’ Cahiers d’art asked at the time of his death in 1947. They decided he wasn’t and that only those whose taste was confined to the facile and pleasing ...”