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“... combined to create a veritable factory of national memory. The real inventors of France are Victor Hugo and Chateaubriand, and historians like Michelet, Guizot and the Thierry brothers. The Gauls took centre stage in 1828 thanks to a book by Amédée Thierry. Then in 1865 Vercingétorix (originally an invention of Julius Caesar, who needed to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 For Isou, such comprehensibility was almost as outdated as the writings of Victor Hugo, the paintings of Delacroix or the music of Wagner: art should represent nothing other than the medium itself, radically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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to treatment with Lourdes water. His Notre-Dame de Lourdes sold over a million copies: more than Victor Hugo, Jules Verne or Alexandre Dumas; more probably than any other book published in France in the 19th century. It ran to 142 editions in just seven years; was translated into 80 languages and remained in print until the Sixties. It did so well ...”

“... merely the supreme example of a modern technocrat, but he was more than that: the heir of Danton, Victor Hugo and Jaurès, the voice of republican conscience in the 20th century, the voice of the Dreyfusards. While that spirit lives, Mendès will be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... As a military venture, Napoleon’s bizarre attempt to persuade the Egyptians that he was, as Victor Hugo later phrased it, ‘the Mohammad of the West’, and that Islam and the Rights of Man could be made compatible, was a tragi-comic disaster. But its cultural impact on Europe was considerable. A form of ‘Egyptomania’ gripped Britain and ...”