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“... As a military venture, Napoleon’s bizarre attempt to persuade the Egyptians that he was, as Victor Hugo later phrased it, ‘the Mohammad of the West’, and that Islam and the Rights of Man could be made compatible, was a tragi-comic disaster. But its cultural impact on Europe was considerable. A form of ‘Egyptomania’ gripped Britain and ...”

“... four and one-half million human beings than to contaminate the Thames with it at heavy expense.’ Victor Hugo was lyrical about the loss: the ‘tumbrils of mud’ that made up nightsoil were ‘the meadow in flower, the green grass, wild thyme, thyme and sage, they are game, they are cattle, they are the satisfied bellows of great oxen in the ...”

“... him immoderate, irresponsible, foolish, careless and naive. It also, undoubtedly, made him great. Victor Hugo in his essay on Shakespeare announced: ‘He is the earth.’ Guthrie likewise: quintessence of ...”

“... amazing . . . She herself is reading 19th-century history and is particularly fascinated by Victor Hugo. Before the operation she was unable to read at all and was interested in nothing.’ As if a lobotomy encouraged intellectual labour. Only much later, in 1979, four years before he died, would the notebooks receive an accurate recounting of the ...”

“... the importance of suspense. I yearned for some of the suspense found in the works of Balzac, Victor Hugo, Tolstoi, Dostoevski, Flaubert, Alexandre Dumas and Strindberg. Yiddish and Hebrew literature both suffered from a lack of suspense. Everything in them centred around some yeshivah student who had gone astray, sought worldly knowledge, then ...”

“... to both categories; those in the second include Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo; others, however, are nonentities. The temptation to dismiss the list out of hand is, as the authors agree, almost irresistible. They have, however, succeeded in establishing to their satisfaction that, apart from the common interest in the ...”

“... of Maine. The impressive essays in That Mighty Sculptor, Time, (an apt title, a quotation from Victor Hugo) range from a serious, well-informed study of Tantric Buddhism to a ‘prose-poem’ of 1931 about the loves of Michelangelo. Many good points are made about her own time (and ours), about feminism and the environment, but more pleasing and eerie ...”

“... is needed is to pick up the pen, rule the paper, patiently fill the lines.’ The big beasts – Victor Hugo above all – could bash it out for eighteen hours a day. Renard admits to his own failure on this front from the start. He wanted, he wrote, to ‘take the fleeting idea by the scruff of the neck and flatten its nose against the paper’, and ...”

“... that’s the enemy.’ She married Gianmartino Arconati Visconti in 1873 – Victor Hugo was one of the witnesses at the wedding. She was 33 at the time, her husband was 34. He died three years later, leaving her an immense fortune. She spent much of it on education, founding chairs at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France, buying ...”

“... proving a strong bond between them. EBB’s confession that she had been covertly reading Victor Hugo and George Sand apparently evoked a sympathetic response, and she impetuously replied by determining to supply the other with the forbidden texts – to make of Miss Mitford ‘an accomplice in act as in desire’. After anonymously ordering a ...”

“... contempt. But if he slates the work – of the great historian Jules Michelet, for example, or of Victor Hugo, whose Les Misérables he sees as directed at ‘all that philosophico-evangelical vermin’ – he usually admires the man, Hugo especially, who in the 1870s he was to find one of the very few people left in ...”

“... of heroes, prophets and saints – Jesus and Muhammad, Julius Caesar, Sun Yat-Sen, Joan of Arc and Victor Hugo (the last two again exhibiting French colonial influence). The press corps in Saigon used to hang around the veranda of the Hotel Continentale, waiting for a lead, and one day in June 1972 they (we) were at a loose end, and I suggested we hire a ...”

“... the men of 2 December 1851 – surely Napoleon III is a villain only for simple-minded readers of Victor Hugo? – and finally the Versaillais (can one really class Thiers with the Vendéens?). This kind of jumble may be excused as the result of hasty writing, but is untenable from the historical point of view. In the same way, explaining popular unity ...”

“... he has a very Nineties sense of Shakespeare’s different significances across Europe, claiming Victor Hugo as an ally in his bid to have the Bard recognised as not just Britain’s but the EU’s national (or supranational) poet; and, unusually for a Shakespearean scholar, he writes conspicuously well about post-Shakespearean music, not just the usual ...”

“... Gorey was reading by the age of three and at eight had begun working his way through the complete Victor Hugo, for reasons he could not in later life reconstruct. His parents’ unhappy marriage, their divorce and (much later) remarriage, were no doubt unsettling, but there was no Gothic horror in his upbringing of the sort that his more literal-minded ...”