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“... had betrayed his troth and was now living on without character. Describing the achievement of Stendhal in passing from the purely anecdotal form of his Italian reminiscences to the ‘mythic’ achievement of La Chartreuse de Parme, Roland Barthes comments that to make a myth ‘there must be the action of two forces.’ Gregor von Rezzori (the author and ...”

“... of Dickens does in London. Equally memorable are his depictions of Saumur, Angoulême or Tours. In Stendhal and Flaubert, the narratives of Le Rouge et le noir and Madame Bovary depend on Besançon and Rouen. In the 20th century, cinema has relayed the tradition. The extreme example is Eric Rohmer, whose Comédies et proverbes and Contes des quatre saisons ...”

“... Dune; by the age of 11 he was mowing a neighbour’s lawn in exchange for a tutorial on Stendhal. It was around this time that his parents gave him his own television set. He watched everything: sitcoms, game shows, Star Trek, soap operas. Among his surviving childhood writings are parodies of jingles: ‘Burpo Soda’ had ‘the taste of wetness ...”

“... Hazlitt’s dealings with Coleridge, Hunt, Keats, Lamb, William Godwin, Edmund Kean, Turner and Stendhal (to name just a few). The biography shows us a situated yet itinerant Hazlitt, seeking out companionship and quarrels in equal measure. Reading these pages, one often registers the force of the figure splendidly described by Robert Louis Stevenson: ‘a ...”

“... over. Not that he didn’t stray to the Continent, also like the Englishman he was. He was mad for Stendhal, especially The Charterhouse of Parma, also Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens meant quite as much to him as Donne or Marvell or Keats, all of whom meant a great deal. And at least one summer and fall were devoted to ...”

“... 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 other living historian approaches the range of this erudition. Every page of Threads and Traces, his latest work to appear in ...”

“... celebrated Flush, offspring of her own beloved spaniel.) For Barrett, who read avidly in Balzac, Stendhal, Eugène Sue and the elder Dumas, as well as Hugo and Sand, this was a literature whose ‘poetry’ and greatness were undeniable – despite its ‘monstrous & hideous morality’: ‘They light me up, & make me feel alive to the ends of my ...”

“... any novel based on it small room for such wilful characters as we are familiar with in Balzac, or Stendhal, or Henry James, or Mark Twain. Malraux went so far as to say that Faulkner conceived his situations in a void without thinking of any character at all, pre-imagining ‘l’écrasement des personnages inconnus’. By writing in terms of myth or saga he ...”

“... contrary, I have a terrible aversion to all that. This is straightforward enough. Shakespeare and Stendhal probably had the same sort of feelings, and Tolstoy had them on the same scale as he had everything else. But it is easy to see why his wife hated Chertkov so much. Nothing could be more infuriating than a man like that whom your husband was always ...”

“... of Sade are debatable, though the same could be said of the accounts of those from Balzac to Stendhal, Flaubert to Baudelaire, Swinburne to Huysmans who had praised Sade before him. But Apollinaire was unquestionably right about Sade’s spirit being preternaturally resistant to intimidation. The first real report we have of the character of the young ...”

“... the literary would have come as something of a surprise to Dante, Pope, Voltaire, Austen, Goethe, Stendhal and Tolstoy; but most of these authors were foreigners, and though other nations may speak of a literary science, the English prefer to define the timeless essence of the literary in terms that have been current only for about two hundred years in a ...”

“... labouring to drain the sea appeared to him on the beach at Civitavecchia near Rome, the port where Stendhal was the French consul 14 centuries later. The story lives on in local memory and is marked by a monument on the beach near an ugly, modern church where the Madonna wept tears of blood for the world in the 1990s. Augustine, for all the dark and dismal ...”

“... time for him than he for it. Unlike another proudly alienated writer of an earlier generation, Stendhal, Flaubert did not comfort himself for the misapprehensions of the present by imagining his success in a more intelligent and hospitable future. He comforted himself by taking the present on, as a weak, effeminate age that called for violent literary ...”

“... or a minute calibration of fashion. John Berryman once said to a friend: ‘Doesn ‘t reading Stendhal make you feel intelligent!’ The same is true of Hazlitt; and the justified praise of Paulin’s book is that the compliment to our amour-propre survives his exploration to a generous degree. Reading him on Hazlitt, you never feel ‘Isn ‘t he being ...”

“... and French artists, were fortunate to have the backing of some of the best writers of the day. Stendhal, Baudelaire, Gautier, Goncourt, Zola, Maupassant, Huysmans and Mallarmé all doubled up as art critics. (The bullish Courbet took on both tasks: doing the work and the self-promotion.) It helped that there were extraordinary new artists to support, as ...”