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“... Onegin begs for Rossini’s treatment, then Pushkin’s life seems to have resembled a libretto by Stendhal with music by Mozart. The extraordinary wealth of Binyon’s research – his biography represents a true lifework, a long simmering of scholarship – only confirms the sense one already had of Pushkin’s maniacal libidinousness, his swaggering ...”

“... followers of the extremist, anti-Semitic Action Française. The young Mitterrand devoured Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, as well as French translations of Faulkner, Joyce and Hemingway; later, as an adult, taken with the notion of ancestral soil, he sometimes seemed closer, aesthetically and intellectually, to the nationalist writer Maurice Barrès. He ...”

“... or ugly, worthy of our effort to find it or not. Beauty is the enemy of certainty. If beauty, as Stendhal said, is a promise of happiness, it is a very dangerous one. We may fail to find the promised thing, and end up bitter and disappointed; worse, we may succeed, and find a happiness which might have seemed contemptible before we began to pursue it: but by ...”

“... was no accident that Powell’s first critical project, when he was in his twenties, was a book on Stendhal, at a time when no Anglophone study yet existed. There was a further element in this distance from any standard Englishry. Powell’s literary culture was unusually wide. In this country, it is difficult to think of any contemporary novelist who matched ...”

“... is no law or government at all; and it is wonderful how well things go on without them.’ Stendhal, who knew the country better, felt at times that ‘music alone is alive in Italy, and all that is to be made in this beautiful land is love; the other enjoyments of the soul are spoilt; one dies poisoned of melancholy as a citizen.’ Yet Italians were ...”

“... which most gives it interest and meaning. Pepys does that, and Rousseau, and Chateaubriand, and Stendhal in La Vie de Henri Brulard, and Newman and Ruskin and Hardy – all the way down to Anthony Powell in his Memoirs and the just published diaries of Barbara Pym. Indeed this contribution to the state of the art by a humbler sister in the fiction business ...”

“... of Dostoevsky, Doctor Zhivago, Thomas Mann, Faulkner, George Eliot, Klebnikov, War and Peace, Stendhal and Cervantes, Boyd explains, ‘particularly liked reading bad literature aloud – “I can’t stop quoting!” he would chortle with glee.’ His ebullience and self-delight were clearly a trial to Edmund Wilson, who, though a generous supporter of ...”

“... the houses and clear out the village. This began in 1823 and was mostly accomplished by 1844; when Stendhal visited the city in 1837, there were still a few of what he calls ‘poor dwellings’ inside the walls. Despite these remaining houses, the first event to take place in the arena after (most of) the clearing was a race of the bulls in 1830, held in ...”

“... why Brideshead? Bedford said that as a teenager she did dabble in writing French, ‘like Stendhal’, but quickly realised that if she was going to be a writer she needed ‘one firm language’ to do it in. ‘My attachment to England was instinctive, a bid for, if not roots, a kind of self-preservation … I held onto the English language as the ...”

“... This can never be said of Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, in this country. Nor abroad of Hugo, Stendhal, Balzac, even Flaubert, of Manzoni, and of all the Russians except Chekhov, who was relatively non-committal. The talkative novelist was evidently the norm and always had been. In America, those who have survived – chiefly Melville and Hawthorne ...”

“... prose literature throughout the 19th and well into the 20th century. Realism as we know it from Stendhal, Dickens, Tolstoy onwards entered German literature relatively late in the day and has been powerfully challenged by other modes of writing. Thus Thomas Mann’s very last work, the unfinished Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man of 1954, is a ...”

“... what fiction means.’ When you turn from that tradition to the work of Laclos, Flaubert, Balzac, Stendhal, Maupassant and Proust, it’s like getting a glass of ice water in the face. Everybody lies all the time; codes of honour are mainly a delusion and will get you into serious trouble; the same goes for love; if you think the world is how it is described ...”

“... money – Borges, Pessoa and O’Brien made a fetish of the book. The solitary hero of Balzac and Stendhal, the figure in Henry James confronting her destiny, Madame Bovary or David Copperfield or even Moby Dick now became the unread or the unwritten book or the newly discovered passage, or the section where the author has lost control, or given up. In ...”

“... there were omissions, there were no silly inclusions; Homer and Virgil and Chaucer accompanied Stendhal and Jane Austen, Dickens and Tolstoy and Henry James; and near the end was one poem that certainly might, in its intensity, be described as ‘short’ – Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This almost token poem, a magnificent simple affair ...”

“... has skyrocketed in the postwar years. In technical terms, pretty much any MFA graduate leaves Stendhal in the dust. On the other hand, The Red and the Black is a book I actually want to read. This reflects, I believe, the counterintuitive but real disjuncture between good writing and good books.McGurl has an explanation for why programme writing seems so ...”