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“... Ten years ago, the Harvard New History of French Literature made not one mention of the remarkable Victor Segalen. How wrong that was. It’s a big book and progressive almost to a fault in what it chooses to cover; Segalen should have been in it, as a writer and theoriser about both life and literature whose concerns are more timely now than they were when he was expressing them ...”

“... The Nazis smelled right to him. There was something authentic about them. Thanks to the book by Hugo Ott, reviewed here by J.P.Stern (20 April 1989), and to those by Victor Farias and others, we now know that Heidegger’s quest for authenticity was mixed in with a lot of vulgar ambition. We also know that when people ...”

“... proclaimed his uncle’s birthday a public holiday. The day of battle itself was immortalised in Hugo’s Les Misérables in 1862, and the oldest French veteran, Louis-Victor Baillot – a conscript – was awarded the Légion d’Honneur. In 1904, 100,000 people attended the official opening of the Wounded Eagle memorial ...”

“... Thomson, benign among proprietors, has come and gone, picking up a peerage in the process. So has Victor Matthews, moving from building-site to Fleet Street and out again in less than ten years. The free or cut-price offers of dictionaries and flower-pots in the 1930s have given way to bingo and cash prizes. As for content, most of the popular papers are as ...”

“... took almost no direct interest in politics until, in January 1932, she was asked to read a poem by Victor Hugo to a women’s pacifist group. As she stood on the stage she was shouted down, one young Brownshirt screaming: ‘You are a criminal . . . Jewish traitress! International agitator!’ She later wrote: ‘In the hall, everything became a mad ...”

“... Harold Stone, and we see him being sweet-talked into the idea over lunch by a charismatic author, Victor Propp (Harold Brodkey-like, he has been writing a massive novel for the last twenty years, with the help of steadily inflating advances), who senses Stone’s loss of faith in his masterpiece and would rather have a young disciple like Russell overseeing ...”

“... Eisenstein, Jean Epstein, Siegfried Kracauer and Adorno. Marcus argues that Lindsay, along with Victor Freeburg and the Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, focused on the sense of ‘beauty’ in film as a way of elevating its status to one of the ‘high arts’. Film criticism in England in the 1920s was also ...”

“... Joseph became king of Naples in 1806. Renamed the Royal Africans and briefly commanded by Joseph Hugo, father of Victor, they fought Calabrian guerrillas before joining Napoleon’s campaigns in Germany and Russia. A strange and bitter journey, which took men from Africa to the Caribbean, to France, to Italy, and then to ...”

“... the Party its opportunity. In the 1919 debate over the Weimar Constitution, the Social Democrat Hugo Sinzheimer put a motion of admirable simplicity: ‘The death sentence is abolished.’ But even sympathisers argued that discussion of the issue should be postponed until the pending revision of the Criminal Code – still pending when the Nazis came to ...”

“... of the unbelievable cold. The French title of the second volume, Il neigeait, is taken from Victor Hugo’s great poem about Napoleon, ‘L’Expiation’, which has much the same place in French culture that ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ holds in British. But Rambaud, unlike Hugo, sketches a war – and ...”

“... general, slices of his legendary life. Leo (Design for Living), Charles Condomine (Blithe Spirit), Hugo Latymer (A Song at Twilight) are all smooth, successful writers. Garry Essendine (Present Laughter), George Pepper (‘Red Peppers’ from Tonight at 8.30) and Elyot Chase, a man of no apparent metier in Private Lives who nonetheless manages a dance and a ...”

“... it declares. The Detective Novel, the Companion tells us, was pioneered by women (Metta Victor and Anna Katharine Green) ‘before Conan Doyle’. The entry on the Novel is similarly chauvinistic: ‘Recent scholarship has confirmed that women took the lead among the earliest novelists.’ One could mock this as being like preglasnost history of ...”

“... Les Jeunes France and their sympathisers who set up the famous battle at the opening night of Victor Hugo’s play Hernani were, like their counterparts in Young England, more style than substance. The battle itself was a defence of the Romantic against the Classical theatre but it was as staged as the play, the participants madly self-conscious and ...”

“... women lifting their skirts on the barricades as soldiers open fire (an incident from Victor Hugo’s Choses vues), but a rearguard action against insecurity and the erosion of rights – to jobs, housing, public services, freedom of movement, asylum. For Sante, one suspects, the jig is already up. He is depressed by the tendency of big ...”

“... there is but one tense, and all ages in her sight are alike present,’ he asserted in a review of Victor Hugo’s L’Année terrible, and this must have been one source of T.S. Eliot’s idea of artistic tradition – and modernist technique – as a ‘simultaneous present’. In ‘On the Cliffs’ (1880), Swinburne experimented with blending ...”