“... surprising in view of the long-held belief that illness can heighten the creative imagination, as Baudelaire noted of the intensity of sound and colour experienced during convalescence. It is not just approaching health, however, but approaching death which clears the sight. ‘I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my ...”

“... devices for the vertical transport of goods, primarily, but also of people. The English diplomat Charles Greville, writing in 1830, recalled with admiration a lift in the Genoese palace of the Sardinian royal couple: ‘For the comfort of their bodies he has a machine made like a car, which is drawn up by a chain from the bottom to the top of the house; it ...”

“... dog sculpture, and Walpole regarded her work as equal to Bernini’s; she also presented busts of Charles James Fox and Nelson to Napoleon – Fox, because of her connection with the Whig opposition and Nelson, presumably, as an object of disinterested admiration now that he was safely dead. Her novelty value as a woman sculptor seems to have secured her ...”

“... times per day, five days per week.’ He’s moved on from Wilde to the works of his great-uncle Charles Maturin (specifically the Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer), developed a taste for classical music and Italian Renaissance art, and begun to think of the management of his panic attacks in religious terms: grace (the mouse in the tunnel) and works (the ...”

“... de Charrière’s ‘The Nobleman’, is still plot-heavy and without psychological nuance. Charles Perrault’s ‘Bluebeard’ seems at home in this cardboard company.Perhaps not all tales are short stories. These early examples are rudimentary as to motive and situation. McGuinness’s wide-angle introduction (the same in both volumes) argues that ...”

“... malignant state, and you can see why modern readers prefer the acrid, misanthropic company of Baudelaire or Flaubert. Taste in fact recoiled from him soon after 1900, in France and in this country, too, where, Anglophobe though he made no secret of being, he had long been looked on as the French writer of the 19th century. In the new age of suspicion, he ...”

“... to throw on more negatives). As for ‘Caligula 1’ – that’s a revision of a translation of Baudelaire’s ‘Spleen’ that first appeared in Imitations. And so on, and so on, and so on. ‘You didn’t write, you rewrote,’ is the epigraph for Bidart’s introduction. I can’t imagine the blizzard of a paper-chase required of Lowell and Bidart; it ...”

“... département. Robb understands the value of the view from below: sometimes literally so, as with Charles-Axel Guillaumot, who from 1777 spent ten years propping up Paris to stop it falling in on its own centuries of quarrying and excavation (he also supervised the reburying of the dead which produced the wittily ghoulish Catacombes at ...”

“... instead of ‘with’ and ‘thru’ instead of ‘through’: Emily Dickinson via Charles Bukowski; Artaud and Bataille laced with American me-first and can-do. Like many rock acts, she’d had years to dream up her world-shut-your-mouth arrival, then suddenly had no time at all to patch together a follow-up. Only ten months on from ...”

“... modern man of late 19th-century fiction – a contemporary of Paul Montague and a predecessor of Charles Gould. The ‘delinquents, vagabonds’ and ‘mercenaries’ with whom he signs up to fight for the Dutch are another, brutal expression of this modernity: ‘true “moderns”’, Steinmetz suspects, among whom Rimbaud can pass incognito, in a world ...”

“... University in Baltimore in 1933. At that time his main reason for being in America was to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, duly published as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. In a year that would have seemed laborious even to a writer not suffering from marital disaster and general ill-health, Eliot added to his Harvard commitment ...”

“... This remark in this context – fine wines, fine linen, old furniture, a child reciting Baudelaire, a man playing an accordion, a venerable grandfather, a spectacular verandah view over the river – offers ‘another dimension’, as Coppola says. But it is another dimension of the insight we have already grasped. These old-world colonists may be ...”

“... Galas identified her as ‘a keeper of the flame of our blood brothers, Nerval and Artaud and Baudelaire.’ She ended by quoting, in farewell, a stanza of Baudelaire’s about a sailor setting out on a voyage. It was one dimension of Acker’s work – the tale of the damned, the voyager, the outsider – but not the ...”

“... had just published The Yellow Book, a collection of long-lined, sophisticated poems steeped in Baudelaire and the fin de siècle. Praising its ‘opulence of means and melodies, the pleure dans le coeur, the combination of buoyancy in the verse and ballast in the feeling’, Heaney concludes: ‘I see Milosz calls poetry a dividend from ourselves: high ...”

“... settled: the woman of independent means who has done quite well for herself, as Carter described Charles Perrault’s version of the figure, who waves wands and make things happen, transcending biological relatedness and bourgeois property law. Carter, Sage proposes, ‘birthed herself’ into that position through years and decades of intellectual and ...”