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“... for others too. He made many friends, ‘mostly for life’.The friendship that soured was with Lucian Freud. The relationship became an obsession for them both and a catastrophe for Craxton at the end of his life. It bracketed a career that never fulfilled its early promise, and the bitterness between the two men was as intense as their early ...”

“... The exhibition of Lucian Freud’s paintings which has already been shown in Washington and Paris, and which moves on to Berlin in the spring, has been amplified at its current London showing with some works on paper – a foretaste of an exhibition devoted to Freud prints and drawings which will open in May at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and will then travel to four other British venues and on to three museums in the United States of America ...”

“... truck.       Flesh fails and failure             is visited upon it. The book of Freud’s paintings       a brooding invitation, catalogue             of human suspension in time and today I think they’re an oil       and pigment howl,             outpouring against limit. But as soon as I’ve said ...”

“... close friend – unexpectedly asked if I would like to be drawn by him. I refer, of course, to Lucian Freud, the product of whose activity is to be seen on the cover of the London Review of Books. I do not think I hesitated for a moment when he asked me. I was flattered beyond words, and a more cautious and vainer man would have stopped to reflect ...”

“... Titian’s Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto were described by Lucian Freud as ‘simply the most beautiful pictures in the world’. And not long ago, in an act of Alex Salmond-defying co-operation, the National Gallery of Scotland and the National Gallery of Great Britain raided their respective coffers – as well as the coffers of their respective, culturally estranged governments – to buy the pictures from the Duke of Sutherland ...”

“... self-portrait now in the National Portrait Gallery, then from the likeness he commissioned from Lucian Freud and bequeathed to the Royal College of Art. It is very long, large-eyed, hollow-cheeked, with a receding chin and dark tousled hair. Photographs suggest that the self-portrait is a better physical likeness; the truth about his emotional state ...”

“... Lucian Freud’s​ mother, Lucie, brought her three sons from Berlin to London in September 1933 when Lucian was almost 11. She was soon followed by her husband, Ernst, an architect and the youngest son of Sigmund Freud. Over the next five or six years, more members of the family, including Sigmund himself, came to England, where their papers were organised by Marie Bonaparte, who put in a good word with the Duke of Kent ...”

“... Lucian Freud​ resembled certain film directors – Ingmar Bergman, for example – in that the lead characters in his works influenced the way the creation took shape, often guiding it into entirely new territory. There is an unspoken understanding between the film director and the actor that their involvement isn’t permanent: the actor may be offered a more desirable part, or the director may feel the need to make a different kind of film ...”

“... to induce a miscarriage before the arrival of her fourth.) ‘Girl with Roses’ (1947) by Lucian Freud These male depictions of the female body – depictions that force us to confront questions of agency and possession – are sometimes uncomfortable. That doesn’t make them incompatible with the experience of pregnancy – which, at its most ...”

“... Back in 1982, as we came out of a show of Lucian Freud’s paintings at Anthony d’Offay’s gallery in Dering Street (it had not been a brief visit), a friend asked what I thought of the rat. ‘What rat?’ I went back inside. It was, of course, there – dark, bright-eyed, its tail draped across the thigh of the man who leans back on a sofa in Naked Man with Rat ...”

“... for the upper classes to mingle with louche artistic types – and, of course, vice versa. She met Lucian Freud at a party given by Lady Rothermere. He was the beautiful untidy young man standing at the back next to Francis Bacon and booing loudly while everyone else clapped Princess Margaret’s execrable rendering of a Cole Porter medley. Here, nicely ...”

“... but – indicatively maternal – protection. Rembrandt painted some women naked. So, too, did Lucian Freud – including one portrait (reproduced in Kate: The Kate Moss Book) of a naked, full length, very pregnant Kate Moss. Mona Lisa too, coincidentally, seems pregnant – hence her not so enigmatic expression. She is both thinking and smiling about ...”

“... connected. Longing powers my own art.In the second volume of William Feaver’s biography of Lucian Freud (Bloomsbury, £35), David Dawson, Lucian’s long-serving assistant, describes Susanna Chancellor, the woman who remained Lucian’s partner longer than anyone else, as ‘a ...”

“... an autobiographical engagement with people and places is common. You find it in the work of Freud, Bacon and Spencer. Freud’s interrogation of the flesh, both intimate and unloving; Bacon’s use of imagery which takes its force from a willingness to do violence to the look of friends and lovers; Spencer’s ...”

“... of his memoirs is from a photograph; the one on David Selbourne’s book is from a portrait by Lucian Freud. In the first he looks severe but quizzical, a kind man but not a man to be put upon; in the second he looks quite desperately sad, as if he had done much to little or no avail, and might well have been put upon quite heavily. Neither quite ...”