“... 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 ...”

“... the dozen or so most accomplished young US writers’, likening him to Chekhov and Stendhal. He refused to pose for a photograph to accompany the piece, so the magazine had to reprint the picture Vogue had taken of him twelve years before, ‘handsome as I have never been’. The Vogue photo was a touchy subject. Schwartz had long felt it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to discourage the match with Merleau-Ponty), where she foresaw a year of love letters and reading Stendhal. But the day after Simone and Zaza had said goodbye, Zaza fell ill. Delirious, with a temperature of 104°, she turned up at Merleau-Ponty’s door and demanded his mother explain why she didn’t want them to marry. When Merleau-Ponty himself arrived ...”

“... longer and longer. But it can avoid becoming a victim of marketing. In The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal wrote: ‘The lover thinks more often of reaching his mistress than the husband of guarding his wife; the prisoner thinks more often of escaping than the jailer of shutting his door; and so, whatever the obstacles may be, the lover and the prisoner ought ...”

“... awareness that the little pattering noise around him is caused by bullets’ – in the thick of Stendhal’s account of the battle of Waterloo.Part of what was incommunicable to Hale in America were feelings of patriotism, at one remove, and ‘the awareness of suffering directly from things which are not directly happening to oneself’. In July ...”

“... consecrated French thinkers. Without knowing it, I was putting into practice an aphorism of Stendhal: entry into society should be conducted as if it were a duel. And what opponents I had chosen!’ It took some nerve to pass off this plagiarism from Nietzsche as his own discovery. Van Middelaar’s account of his ascent to Brussels in The Passage to ...”