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“... today’s New Agers. But 19th-century spiritists were not all fogbound crackpots. Napoleon III and Victor Hugo, enemies in politics, were both ‘comforted by mediums who brought spirits back into their homes’: the philosopher Henri Bergson lectured on the topic (and believed in it); and when Captain Dreyfus’s brother, a man of high culture and ...”

“... On the first two weekends of the occupation, the temperature dropped below -20° C. I thought of Victor Hugo on Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow: ‘Deux ennemis: le Czar et le Nord. Le Nord est pire.’ The protesters were winning one battle just by coming out in the cold: for this demographic, being able to deal with the weather is a badge of ...”

“... one set of illusions or prejudices for another. Robb, who has written fine biographies of Balzac, Hugo and Rimbaud, is most at home in the 19th century, but he doesn’t subscribe to that century’s certainties about progress, or to the Paris-centred vision of those who, like Baudelaire, opposed the period’s shibboleths. At times, The Discovery of France ...”

“... and with democratic tendencies linked to the ideologies of 1848’ (he had Eugène Sue and Victor Hugo particularly in mind). Simenon’s Maigret novels can be seen as a recovery of that ‘democratic’ impulse, although in conditions that called for a new kind of realism and a corresponding despatch of the mythic hero of the novels of ...”

“... a restaurant – on the Grand’ Place. A few French writers – Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine, Victor Hugo – spent time in Brussels when for one reason or another they had to leave France. Edith Cavell, the English nurse who said ‘Patriotism is not enough,’ was executed by the Germans in 1915 for helping fugitive soldiers escape to Holland. I ...”

“... shutters being closed. ‘Does God Exist? Aurora Library. No more questions, Aurora, darling! Victor Hugo, Les Misérables. Hell’s not miserable. Madame Bovary. One less ovary!’ The books resist being consumed, releasing a viscous, sickening smoke. They are like creatures – ‘he saw it suddenly fan out its fresh pollack’s red gills’; ‘a ...”

“... not only in his choice of subjects (four operas based on Schiller, three on Shakespeare, two on Victor Hugo, two on Byron), but in a breadth of grasp, human and historical, which sometimes outdoes his source: this in both text and music, for Verdi was virtually his own librettist and used Francesco Maria Piave as a mere versifying dogsbody. Verdi and ...”

“... Fisher and Co show photographs of an archetypal French provincial street, one of a thousand rues Victor Hugo, obliterated by the disaster. Hiroshima is the nearest we surfacedwellers have yet come to duplicating the destruction wrought by magma. Even so, we have failed to manufacture an equivalent of the ghastly lahars: the suffocating mudslides which ...”

“... Monday, outside the Panthéon, where France’s great and good are buried (Voltaire, Zola, Victor Hugo, but not Madame de Lafayette) which set the ball rolling. The readers included Louis Garrel, Nemours in Christophe Honoré’s film, and lecturers and students from the Universities of Paris. Each person read for five minutes, then passed the ...”

“... of John’s professional life that I should have spoken about: his translations – Stendhal, Victor Hugo, Proust, Georges Perec and several others. Or his books: on structuralism, on autobiography; the guide to the Pyrenees. But then he hasn’t been there to advise me. Letters I was very sad to learn of John’s passing. The loss of another link ...”

“... suddenly became a central part of French consciousness and the preoccupation of writers such as Hugo and Dumas. The young Berlioz worshipped her from afar, but so intensely that he nearly had a mental breakdown. She became the inspiration and programme of the Symphonie Fantastique. Eventually he married her. But by the time he was introduced to his idée ...”

“... author that he undoubtedly was, as representative of the European Romantic spirit as Balzac or Victor Hugo’? These are grand claims and, if they’re true, we might well use this lively and informative biography to acquaint ourselves further with Andersen’s life and work. On the face of it, however, the claims strain credulity. I imagine that, for ...”

“... progressivism could hardly be more out of season, and Brecht’s favourable comparison of him to Victor Hugo will quicken few pulses. Historians of the Kaiser’s Germany still refer to the character Diederich Hessling from Heinrich’s novel, Der Untertan, but even this wonderful monster of arrogance to those below, and subservience to those ...”

“... the avenue de la Grande Armée, not far from the last home of that other millionaire republican, Victor Hugo. The ‘Haussmannisation’ of Paris, and the property speculation that supported it, were clearly not confined to the Second Empire. Throughout the 1890s, the ‘château’ at 65 avenue de la Grande Armée, where ‘even the lavatory brushes ...”

“... the Republic. Zola was fully conscious of his role as public intellectual, citing the precedent of Victor Hugo: ‘If such an odious deed had been done in Hugo’s time, he would have thundered with the voice of justice and defended the people’s rights.’ Zola, too, thunders, passionately, magisterially, amid the ...”