“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Rabelais and Saint John the Baptist, as well as Chesterton, Mao Zedong, Maurice Barrès and Victor Hugo. In this orgy of comparisons and endorsements, the Dibamba/Yonda contest is an insignificant and almost ludicrous footnote. I wrote to reassure him: Please do not worry about the Douala article . . . It could well be that the léproseries in ...”

“... possible to miss the real in this sense, to get it wrong, or not care about it. As Auerbach thinks Victor Hugo, for example, doesn’t care about it, he just enjoys mixing ‘the sublime and grotesque’. It’s also possible for the reader or viewer to disagree about whether the real is present or not in any particular set of words or images. I think ...”

“... is the idea of the social ‘underworld’ of criminals and slum-dwellers, which is attributed to Victor Hugo in Les Misérables. After Hugo, every fictional underground journey is also a social journey, a descent into man-made abysses or into the lower depths of a circumscribed society. Here is Wells, in a youthful ...”

“... risk putting themselves in competition with historians, who are usually accorded more patience. Victor Hugo would be forgotten today if all he had written was Ninety-Three, his fictional version of the Terror and the Vendée rebellion (though the book made a deep impression on the young Stalin, for reasons that now seem too easy to imagine). Egypt’s ...”

“... sent and received. For Isou, such comprehensibility was almost as outdated as the writings of Victor Hugo, the paintings of Delacroix or the music of Wagner: art should represent nothing other than the medium itself, radically deformed.Ion-Isidor Goldstein was born in 1925 in the town of Botoșani in north-east Romania. His father, Jindrich, was a ...”

“... intertwined with the events and ideas of a particular historical time. Like Tolstoy – or like Victor Hugo – she deals with both banal and terrible conditions, following her hero and heroine into the rough tribunal, where Delphine pleads for her friend as Germaine de Staël once, more successfully, had pleaded for a friend of her own. Like ...”

“... idea of China as a flowery vegetable kingdom where time stood still: a ‘land of embryos’, as Victor Hugo put it, where all signs of innovation were arrested on conception. Seize the Hour is a very suggestive study of the theatricalisation of perceptions that was such a pronounced feature of the Cold War. Nixon knows that he is in Beijing, but he is ...”

“... which Paris regularly spawns: Hemingway at the Ritz bar, Sartre at the Deux Magots, Balzac and Victor Hugo practically everywhere – here we go again. It’s partly that the Francophile tends not to absorb Paris in a head-on fashion. Instead, it comes at us constantly through novels, paintings, opera, cinema, chansons, popular mythology ...”

“... like many former republicans, Verdi turned in disillusionment towards the Piedmont of Cavour and Victor Emmanuel as the only hope for Italian independence. In 1861, Cavour persuaded a reluctant Verdi to stand for Parliament. The two men shared a realistic, hard-headed business sense and a keen interest in agricultural improvements. Phillips-Matz makes clear ...”

“... four and one-half million human beings than to contaminate the Thames with it at heavy expense.’ Victor Hugo was lyrical about the loss: the ‘tumbrils of mud’ that made up nightsoil were ‘the meadow in flower, the green grass, wild thyme, thyme and sage, they are game, they are cattle, they are the satisfied bellows of great oxen in the ...”

“... them and their often disparate specialities have never previously been explored. Walter Scott and Victor Hugo feature among the less familiar scholars, and some painters, including Bonnington and Delacroix, make brief appearances. As these names suggest, Hill has much to tell us about Anglo-French relations, present as well as past.We learn, for ...”

“... and repulsive, exert a continuing fascination because of the seeming purity of their beliefs, what Victor Hugo in his novel Ninety-Three called ‘the blind certitude of the arrow that sees nothing but the target and flies straight there’. Because of this fascination, there is always temptation to take their words as evidence of a deep collective ...”