“... Nocturne’, he returns to his days as a young rebel, when he and his friends took Dostoevsky and Stendhal as their political inspiration:                         Plaza del Zocalo, vast as the heavens:                                 diaphanous space, court of ...”

“... your own. In The Mimic Men Ralph Singh reads Le Rouge et le noir and, ‘full of the closeness of Stendhal’, sees blood in Isabella’s red sky. ‘How easy it is,’ he writes, ‘to turn that landscape, which we make ordinary by living in it and becoming part of it, into the landscape of the battlefield.’ In the Hour of Signs, despite the spilling of ...”

“... theme by another’s book. One particular sentence from The English Patient, where Ondaatje echoes Stendhal – ‘A novel is like a mirror walking down a road’ – might well stand as a motto for After Hannibal. This not only for what it says about how self-conscious we now are about realism, but also because it’s an echo of an echo, and thus typical of ...”

“... bravely suggests, that ‘for Solal, Cohen has the same mix of affect ion and ridicule which Stendhal showed for Julien Sorel.’ There is a sense that Cohen knows much of Solal’s posturing is absurd, but it’s absurd only because it makes manifest life’s absurdity. It is offered to us as a form of clarity and courage, a willingness to take ...”

“... influences and the cosmopolitanism of a great seaport. Previous literary exiles had included Stendhal, Charles Lever and Richard Burton. In addition, Trieste had its own literary world: Futurism flourished there, Marinetti visited frequently and contributed to local papers, and Joyce’s pupil and friend Ettore Schmitz would later – encouraged by his ...”

“... facts could not be relied on: ‘Henry Brulard’ – as artificial a concoction as ‘Stendhal’ – claimed that he thought of writing his life-story at a suitably picturesque place on a gloriously sunny day when he was still on the sunny side of 50. His biographer exposes this engagingly frank first sentence as false: we are being nudged ...”

“... mind that Allen Lane had been publishing quality paperbacks – including editions of Stendhal – for decades.) Epstein left Doubleday when they refused, on moral grounds, to publish Lolita. He did not think Nabokov’s novel ‘a work of genius’, but felt, as a point of professional honour, that it ought to be published by a respectable ...”

“... of that great central tradition. Rohinton Mistry has an affinity with Dickens, and some say with Stendhal, but the English novelist he most resembles seems to be Arnold Bennett. Bennett was a novelist of great skill and resource, well aware of the new techniques, new styles of ‘treatment’, currently being explored by Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, and aware ...”

“... Kingdom is how John Ash begins his poem ‘Visigothic’. Am I good or bad, clever or stupid? Stendhal asks himself in the summer of 1832 is the opening of a poem by Charles Boyle. Wet from the shower    towelling your breasts you ask me if I’ve read    Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic goes Michael Hulse’s poem ‘Fornicating and Reading ...”

“... sounding constantly behind her own: the quotations on illness range from the Greeks to Keats and Stendhal, Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield and Auden. The not-so-curious fact is that when people claim to have found the essay helpful in their own and others’ time of illness, it’s not because it persuaded them to make less of the situation, but rather that it ...”

“... Mancha’ and the ‘Sons of Waterloo’. The latter are the worldly and prosaic realist writers, Stendhal, Balzac, Thackeray and Tolstoy. (These genealogies, by the way, are almost entirely male, and though it centres on a child in the womb Christopher Unborn is among the most patriarchal of contemporary novels.) Gore Vidal in his recent incarnation is a Son ...”

“... which he touchingly felt to lurk just a few months’ hard work away. He was not, like Byron or Stendhal, both a poet or a novelist and a legend. At the same time he was obsessed with the possibility. Probably the best account of his youthful self is in the first volume of Anthony Powell’s memoirs, Infants of the Spring. ‘He was one of those individuals ...”

“... to the magri or supermagri – the lean masters of implicit narrative, like Jane Austen and Stendhal. Gilmour points out that when he was writing The Leopard, in the last two years of his life, he was disappointed to find himself a grosso. Indeed, the vigour of the novel’s characters is reflected in the prose, and can be matched only with difficulty ...”

“... that other writers achieve by seclusion and with time Sartre achieves instantly. He is like Stendhal, who wrote that all his life reality had escaped him because for him to see was to think and reality inescapably an idea. Sartre’s cherished ‘freedom’, his Nothingness, is not an unequivocally heroic quality when it is also protective, keeping him ...”

“... world – to which our most trustworthy guide is not Robert Merton but Sir Lewis Namier or the Stendhal who understood Julien Sorel – Cuvier did indeed become the great place-man, dispensing a loaf here to nephew Charles and some fishes – mainly fossil ones – to brother Frédéric. And he did so because he played a cool hand in the patronage game ...”