“... Flaubert’s​ L’Éducation sentimentale (1869) is rightly celebrated as a masterwork of literary realism, but it also, quite consistently, makes us wonder whether we know what realism is, or what else might be caught up in it. One of the novel’s characters, a painter, thinks the very concept is ridiculous: ‘Down with Realism! A painter needs to paint the spirit!’ It’s true that this character, a man called Pellerin, later becomes a photographer, a gesture we are invited to see as the entire defeat of everything he used to stand for ...”

“... follow nine contemporary intellectuals – d’Agoult, the novelists George Sand, Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert, the statesman Lamartine, the liberal theorist and parliamentarian Alexis de Tocqueville and the socialists Karl Marx, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Alexander Herzen – into the revolution, link arms with them as they pass through its ...”

“... direction as well. Then we make a key decision: should this translator be ancient or modern? Flaubert’s contemporary, or ours? After a little thought, we might plump for an Englishwoman of Flaubert’s time, whose prose would inevitably be free of anachronism or other style-jarringness. And if she was of the ...”

“... but it doesn’t tell us where they, or any other word, occur. For that you have to go to the Flaubert website run by the University of Rouen.Misremembering (1)In the years before digitisation, it could be a hazy business noticing and remembering how often a word occurs in a particular book. And the misremembering of books can be as radical as the ...”

“... of his life, or that it brought upon the comrade of 1968 certain inevitable reproaches. But why Flaubert? After all, Sartre recorded in Les Mots how, as a child, he was ‘poisoned’ by the ‘old bile’ and the ‘abstract hatred of mankind’ of Flaubert, Gautier and the Goncourts; and a harsh excommunication was also ...”

“... while writing Bleak House. It, too, suggests that the Victorian virus never struck randomly: ‘Gustave Flaubert used to say that he suffered with his characters even as he created them, that he became invaded by nervous anxiety at the same time as his characters, and even shared in the agony induced by the arsenic poisoning of Emma Bovary. Dickens’s ...”

“... raw material, squeezes it into novelty-shaped moulds and palms it off as the real thing. Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) is really just a ground up thesis, seasoned, reconstituted and skewered on a long, thin story. A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989) is a series of little oyster-like essays set in the vast grey, greasy sea of history and The ...”

“... Perhaps repelled by the way 19th-century crowd psychologists such as Hippolyte Taine and Gustave Le Bon analysed – and demonised – the ‘savage’ and ‘irrational’ revolutionary mobs, most of them rejected all historical applications of psychoanalysis as inherently unreliable. Yet as Peter Gay has aptly pointed out, insofar as every ...”

“... or Gauguin; only one letter to Renoir is here. Some of the exchanges are partial, like that with Gustave Moreau, whose friendship was vital when both men were young and aspiring in Italy; they knew one another for decades, but the only four extant letters to Moreau all date from 1858-59. At the other extreme there are an enormous number of letters – twice ...”

“... it was written. Consider Robbe-Grillet’s 1962 story ‘La Chambre secrète’, dedicated to Gustave Moreau. It begins: ‘The first thing to be seen is a red stain, of a deep, dark, shiny red, with almost black shadows. It is in the form of an irregular rosette, sharply outlined, extending in several directions in wide outflows of unequal ...”