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“... Mendelssohn. Clara Schumann never forgave him and, a decade later, ranged herself with the young Brahms and the violinist Joseph Joachim, who had declared Liszt’s New German School ‘contrary to the innermost spirit of music’ and ‘strongly to be deplored and condemned’. The ensuing war dragged on into the 1880s, but by then – with Brahms and ...”

“... but ends up painting what, in the story itself (which mixes fiction with 17th-century fact), the young Nicolas Poussin describes as ‘nothing [ ... ] but confused masses of colour contained by a multitude of strange lines, forming a high wall of paint’. Cézanne, who, Gasquet informs us, had a copy of the book tout fripé, sâli et décousu almost ...”

“... desire, he would be what the book’s American critics have said he is: chronically indecisive, a young man in the mould of Bellow’s Dangling Man with no reason to act. He would be paralysed. As an over-privileged well-educated white middle-class twentysomething with a taste for recycled philosophy, he could have paced around his room and loitered ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the centre of a circle – or rather successive circles – which included Stendhal, Mérimée, Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Tocqueville, Delacroix, Thiers, Renan, Turgenev. Her English friends included not only Mrs Gaskell but George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, the Thackerays, the Brownings, the Trollopes, the Stanleys, the Russells ... To Florence Nightingale she ...”

“... category that includes a few husbands), proceeding to penitents, martyred matrons (seven young boys among them) and martyred virgins. Like the architecture to which it is wedded, it unfolds, stanza by stanza.Little in the way of physical action is represented, though a notable exception is the penitent actress Pelagia, who raises her arms to remove ...”

“... In 1931 she came out, went to dances, had beaux and settled into the rest of her life. Several young men proposed to her and for no reason that anyone can now remember she said yes to Shane O’Neill, a tall young man with a job in the City, whose family, Mr Amory reports, is ‘the most ancient in Europe that it has ...”

“... Downey Jr) leading the yeses (he’s just had a difficult encounter with the mother of a young man they accidentally killed in a preceding film). Both are reasonable positions, and we may, according to our own politics, think either is confirmed or denied by the bomb explosion that hits the UN session in Vienna where the accords are being signed. But ...”

“... an emotional letter of forgiveness to Techow’s mother, prompting strong feelings of guilt in the young man. On his release in 1927 he joined the French Foreign Legion, and during the Second World War is said to have expiated his crime by saving Jews in Marseille from deportation to Auschwitz. Police inquiries soon established that the three ...”

“... as if old habits die hard, or to prove bona fides. I guessed he was selling cleaning products; young men had been before and we’d bought their expensive dusters. Today I told him thanks but no thanks – and as the words left my mouth a change came about: I regretted refusing to help him (yet felt committed) and his eyes burned back. ‘But your ...”

“... all Salon pictures were still lifes, even a picture of a heroic battle or a portrait of Victor Hugo – perhaps especially a portrait of Victor Hugo, whose marmoreal fame had turned him into a still life already.This is not, of course, as simple or monumental a story as the professional insiders v. the excluded ...”

“... two years, living alone in the mountains. She had gone there with friends – an older couple, Hugo and Luise – to spend a weekend at Hugo’s hunting lodge. They arrived late in the afternoon and Hugo and Luise popped down to the village for a meal, but she was tired, and stayed ...”

“... Although W.H. Auden, who ranks with Hugo von Hofmannsthal among the master librettists of the age, thought that the meaning of libretto’s words were its least important component (at any rate, so far as the audience is concerned), and that a libretto is ‘really a private letter to the composer’, he also found that ‘as an art-form involving words, opera is the last refuge of the High Style ...”

“... power. And that seems to me to lead to the core of his importance. He is nearer to Schiller and Hugo than to Shakespeare or Goethe, an oratorical rather than a poetic genius. Hildegard Freifrau Hugo von Spitzemberg, the greatest diarist of the previous generation in Germany and the mother of one of Kessler’s ...”

“... showering them with concern – was recognisably the same person of whom Jim Prior complained to Hugo Young in 1981: ‘She hasn’t really got a friend left in the whole cabinet. One reason she has no friend is that she subjects everyone to the most emotionally exhausting arguments; the other is that she still interrupts everyone all the time. It makes ...”