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“... As Graham Robb points out, the ‘discovery’ of France – by politicians, bureaucrats, map-makers, statisticians, engineers, folklorists, tourists and, until fairly recently, the country’s inhabitants on the rare occasions when they ventured outside their own patch – almost invariably involved the swapping of one set of illusions or prejudices for another ...”

“... us that Rimbaud was keen to show Nouveau the Crystal Palace – ‘the virtual-reality dome’, as Graham Robb calls it. And there, perhaps, is the source of the fantastical dome of the Sainte-Chapelle in the poem, vastly oversized and raised on a massive modern metal frame. ‘Cities [I]’ was copied out by Nouveau, not Rimbaud, and in the sensational ...”

“... street barricades manned by the very People that he should have been supporting. This, says Graham Robb, was ‘the central event’ of Hugo’s life, the guilt attaching to his participation leading on to the increasingly populist views of his later years and to the writing of what is far and away his noblest piece of literature, Les ...”

“... Liberation, 1968, and so on, even unto Whither Paris, City of Light, in the Transnational Age? Graham Robb and Eric Hazan are both keen to avoid the Gendarme Plod approach, and well aware that, as Robb puts it, ‘a changing metropolis with a population of millions can never be comprehended by a single ...”

“... lines, causing considerable annoyance to the Ministry of Works with its activities at Stonehenge. Graham Robb’s archaeo-psycho-geographical-antiquarian bicycle tour of France has something of all of these about it. Like Patrick Keiller’s film Robinson in Space (1997), which pursues the ‘problem of England’ through the eyes of an unseen narrator ...”

“... a glowering, berobed author. There is, I’m glad to say, no evidence of any inhibiting piety in Graham Robb’s dashing new Life of this monumental figure, the first to have been written in English for more than sixty years. This is a delightfully free and easy biography that takes firm hold of its subject by his more clownish side. It is written with ...”

“... attacks on the barricades. ‘He was a dutiful man,’ Bellos remarks. Hugo’s biographer Graham Robb puts it more brutally. ‘This means that [Hugo] was directly responsible for the deaths of untold numbers of workers.’*Les Misérables also offers a barricade melodrama, though set in the minor and earlier uprising of 1832. Here the book’s ...”

“... Vane, and no one else is likely to. In his book Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century, Graham Robb made a strong case that the granddaddy of them all, Poe’s Dupin, is coded as homosexual. Offering a dry précis of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, he writes: ‘There is, of course, nothing essentially odd about the passionate, secretive ...”

“... or what was Rimbaud?There have been excellent answers to this question, from long biographies by Graham Robb (2000) and Jean-Jacques Lefrère (2001) to Edmund White’s short but thought-filled account of ‘the double life of a rebel’ (2008). And there is no doubt, so far as I know, that a person called Arthur Rimbaud wrote the works and letters ...”

“... homosexual. There weren’t very many of these books, and most are long forgotten. But already, as Graham Robb observed in Strangers, his study of homosexuality in the 19th century, the trope of the ‘gay tragic ending’ was in evidence: ‘In twelve European and American novels (1875-1901) in which the main character is depicted, often ...”

“... day war broke out’, many will instinctively hear the phrase in the baffled tones of the comedian Robb Wilton who began a famous monologue with it. If I try to recall the actual day war broke out, on 3 September 1939, I can calculate that I was just 14, and remember that about that time, give or take a week, I had a stiff neck from diving into Hoylake Baths ...”

“... one current academic strategy has to deliver; while two treatments of Caravaggio, by Andrew Graham-Dixon and by Michael Fried, come at that painter’s place in history from wildly disparate angles. Spear, Sohm and their five coauthors investigate five 17th-century urban art worlds. Those of Florence and Venice are so downbeat they would be the despair ...”

“... then, for him to acknowledge as indispensable two particular books about Caravaggio (by Andrew Graham-Dixon and Peter Robb) from which he has drawn an enormous amount.Sudden Death is full of asides: ‘As I write, I don’t know what this book is about. It’s not exactly about a tennis match … Maybe it’s just a book ...”