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“... ever changed the fibres of his character.’ Through all the ups and downs of fortune recounted in Charles Hobday’s biography, the essential stuff of the man remains the same. Rickword was born in Colchester in 1898, the son of the town’s first borough librarian, who was also a local historian. Edgell’s background was thus in a petit bourgeois family of ...”

“... travel, memoirs and numberless newspaper articles – probably running to more than 300 titles. As Charles Hugo put it, ‘everyone has read Dumas, but nobody has read everything of Dumas’s, not even Dumas himself.’ It is well-authenticated that some works which appear under the name of Dumas were not written by him at all, and certain of his rivals even ...”

“... in the museum net and that of objects which still float free. Primary texts are those in which Baudelaire and Benjamin describe the flâneur’s disengaged observation of the city’s unfathomable complexity. At the time I was reading The Delirious Museum I took a Saturday walk in Paris from the Musée Carnavalet, which stands in the narrow streets of the ...”

“... Yet this withdrawal only incited more publicity and pressure for access. After much effort Baudelaire breached the threshold and was able to ‘penetrate the fortifications of that studio’. While other men craved privacy for vice, he wrote, Delacroix demanded it for ‘drunken orgies of work’. Rather than the fashionable clutter, there reigned ‘a ...”

“... In February 1758 the 90-year-old Charles Lullin, a retired Swiss civil servant whose sight had been progressively failing since a cataract operation five years before, began to see considerably more than he had become accustomed to. For the next several months he was visited in his apartment by a silent procession of figures, invisible to everyone but him: young men in magnificent cloaks, perfectly coiffured ladies carrying boxes on their heads, girls dancing in silks and ribbons ...”

“... hospitals. Writing from ‘an artificial paradise it is Hell to get into’, he channelled Baudelaire and aimed to ‘be the new Rimbaud, and not die at 37 but set the record straight’. He died in 2002, leaving the record anything but straight.Wieners is admired by other writers for his nonconformity, his tenderness and outrageous ...”

“... predictable. In the first paragraph of the General Introduction Deane compares this anthology with Charles Read’s Cabinet of Irish Literature (1879): it would be interesting to learn why Field Day rejected writers such as Monk, Ryves, Tighe, Leadbetter, Hall, Mulholland, and over a dozen other women who appear in Read. I particularly missed some of the ...”

“... regarded as ‘conventional’. No one could describe Francois Villon or Marlowe or Chatterton or Baudelaire or D.H. Lawrence or Ernest Hemingway as conventional, but what about Thomas Hardy or Anthony Trollope or Jane Austen or Charles Dickens or John Galsworthy? And, in particular, what about John Mortimer? He would, I ...”

“... In five years, we’ve picked our way through Ronsard, Tennyson, Edward Lear, Wendy Cope, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Yeats, Herbert, Donne, Larkin, Housman (who, I discover, admitted to his French translator that he had never spent much time in Shropshire), John Clare, A.A. Milne, Shelley, Blake, Eliot (Macavity, not Prufrock) and – thanks to Seamus ...”

“... which Bouilhet reluctantly frequented, alongside his more illustrious contemporaries, Nerval, Baudelaire and Gautier. Various bits and pieces of Bouilhet’s letters to Flaubert have already been published in French. They are to be found, in the literary equivalent of an unmarked grave, interred alongside the poetry of Louise Colet, in the small print at ...”

“... with the transformation of Louis-Philippe into a pear (poire – also French slang, fathead) by Charles Philipon, shortly to become the founder of Le Charivari. His fellow caricaturists joyfully took up the image, and the pear, in innumerable forms, became the emblem not only of the king but of his courtiers and ministers and all the avaricious speculators ...”

“... Ricardou claimed to have found in the novel a network of ‘c’ and ‘b’ words, starting from Charles Bovary announcing his name on his first day of school, heard as ‘Charbovari’ and becoming ‘charivari’, a synonym for the vacarme (tumult) that follows among his classmates. The pattern continues up to the description of ...”

“... elegies, which dwell at length on what the mourners must now live without, like the farewell to Baudelaire, ‘Ave Atque Vale’: And now no sacred staff shall break in blossom, No choral salutation lure to light A spirit sick with perfume and sweet night And love’s tired eyes and hands and barren bosom. There is no help for these things; none to ...”

“... formal, gardens, where one does one’s reverence, as one goes, to Verlaine, to Sainte-Beuve, to Baudelaire, Flaubert, Stendhal, Georges Sand, all sitting there on pedestals as if the purpose of literature were to look down upon the world. My favourite statuary in the Luxembourg is dedicated to Frédéric Chopin. Whoever designed it was a miracle of ...”

“... behaviour then (and still hasn’t exactly died out). If Louise Colet was a hustler, so were Baudelaire and Mallarmé. Then we come to the books. ‘The novel can be read for the story,’ Lottman tells us of Madame Bovary, and this is, alas, his most incisive remark. His one-paragraph plot-summary also includes the sentence: ‘Meanwhile, ...”