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“... was on 18th-century physics. Over the next half-dozen years he made some twenty documentaries, on Victor Hugo, Pascal, Louis Lumière, Edgar Allan Poe, urban architecture, the evolution of the French language and a weirdly captivating programme on cement. It helped that Rohmer was always curious: Big Ears was one of his nicknames, for the enjoyment he ...”

“... religious idiom, a life in accord with God’s natural laws. (‘Gluttony punishes the glutton,’ Victor Hugo wrote in Les Misérables: ‘Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.’) Relax, take a walk in the country, eat moderately and slowly, avoid intoxicating drinks and stimulants, get what’s now called the work-life ...”

“... the ‘autobiography’ of an Indian untouchable woman appears in French using expressions from Victor Hugo. The falsity in The White Tiger goes much further. It means having a character who cannot read Urdu, and certainly has no notion of Persian, tell us that his favourite poets include Jalaluddin Rumi and Mirza Ghalib. It means having someone who ...”

“... with table manners. Balzac pumped him for information on organised crime and political espionage. Victor Hugo used him as a model for Jean Valjean, the reformed convict of Les Misérables, and also, recognising Vidocq’s versatility, for Valjean’s maniacally principled pursuer, Inspector Javert. In the 1830s and 1840s, Vidocq was called back to the ...”

“... are the novel sects that sprang up out of Western intercourse, hybrid faiths, one of them with Victor Hugo ensconced in its pantheon. Possibly the same receptivity, of a people perpetually forced by necessity to innovate and borrow, helped to make Vietnam in our century so open to Marxism. But the events of the French occupation may suggest that ...”

“... this, his induction, first into the world of literature forbidden by the seminary, from Zola and Victor Hugo to Tolstoy and Saltykov-Shchedrin, and then into the world of revolution. While Stalin was still a seminarian (he dropped out at the age of 20), and before he became known as a revolutionary, he made something of a reputation as a poet, writing ...”

“... the afflicted were one of the sights. ‘On comprend les crétins dont [pullule] la Suisse,’ Victor Hugo wrote from Bern in 1839. ‘Les Alpes font beaucoup d’idiots.’ Mark Twain, in 1880, reported the words of an English traveller: ‘I have seen the principal features of Swiss scenery – Mount Blanc and the goitre – now for ...”

“... Minister. But that was only the start of such dalliance. The Express proprietor at the time was Victor Matthews, a builder and property-developer. Matthews was apparently desperate for an honour, and not best pleased when Junor got one first. But he didn’t have to wait too long. For the editor went selflessly to work among his cronies. The Prime ...”

“... behind them, are these: ‘Short History of Old Art’, ‘Perhaps So’, two translations from Victor Hugo, ‘The Dying of a Long Lost Lover’, ‘Hill of the Bees’, ‘A Myth Enacted’, ‘Slow Bell from the High Hill’, ‘John Hunter’s Canal’, ‘The Lawn of Trees and Rocks’, ‘Quelle Histoire’, and (an unusual exertion of ...”

“... he wrote as if his modern French models had never existed. More than that, he wrote as if Victor Hugo had never existed. The tightly focused language which Eliot and Pound discovered and coveted in the French moderns was simply not what attracted Brennan. The proof is in his unshaken capacity to compose with the English equivalent of the full ...”

“... public. The most difficult thing to come to terms with, then, is that Tolstoy did not believe, as Victor Hugo more conveniently did, that a commitment to social or spiritual progress could be achieved through huge novels earning vast advances and aimed at entertaining the middle classes. If anything, Tolstoy had come to see literature, with its ...”

“... while others were calling it a ‘breakthrough’. What would they have made of the nude Victor Hugo in plaster in the Luxembourg Garden? Or ‘The Kiss’ (‘Rather too suggestive’?) in marble. Unfailingly, one would have heard judgments as to what was permissible and impermissible in art. James himself, however unversed in politics he might ...”

“... She was not so much a Muse, though that was how she was known, as a confidante of great men: Victor Cousin, Hugo, Mussel, Vigny. Yet she lacked a sense of self-preservation; she could have lived with either Cousin or Vigny and been comfortable and cared for. In fact, she was fallible and perhaps less than ...”

“... Janet records the young Roussel predicting that his glory would one day outshine that of Victor Hugo or Napoleon, that he felt himself the equal of Dante and Shakespeare. His final testament more modestly hopes that, ‘faute de mieux’, his books may one day gain some measure of posthumous recognition. It was while composing La Doublure, which ...”

“... Pirandellian tension, the feeling that Hamlet never belongs in the play he inhabits but seems, as Victor Hugo put it, like a somnambulist. He addresses the Western imagination with extraordinary power, but never addresses his own situation with as much intellectual acuity as we might confidently expect from a Banquo. If this is true, it is not surprising ...”