“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In the great lineage of classical realism from Stendhal to Tolstoy, a whole history is summarised in the fortunes of a particular family or set of characters. Individuals are portrayed in all their idiosyncrasy, but are made to represent more than themselves. Things are at once unique and exemplary. A belatedly flowering example of the species is The Leopard, in which the slow decay of a Sicilian nobleman coincides with the clamorous rise of bourgeois Italy ...”

“... go.’ The serenity treats religion as if it were, almost self-evidently, nonsense – think of Stendhal, Russell, even Hume. For Stendhal, the priests are hypocrites, therefore religion is a lot of hypocritical nonsense. Nietzsche is the great wild exception to this, and Camus the great calm exception: both, in their ...”

“... of panoramic construction, but the analytic psychology he learned from Rousseau and (above all) Stendhal, whose role in his development as a writer might be compared with that of Ferguson and Stewart in Scott, as the Enlightenment antidote controlling and redeeming the melodrama of national salvation. The greatness of War and Peace lies here: in the side of ...”

“... as the publishers claim, but it is good to be able to find Poe and Hawthorne as one finds Stendhal and Proust. These two James volumes are particularly useful, since nothing like as complete a gathering of his criticism has ever been made. Two volumes of fiction (from Watch and Ward to The Bostonians) are already out; four more are to come. I puzzled ...”

“... very fabric … This is true even for the most cosmopolitan writers of the time: one thinks of Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy and Robert Louis Stevenson. Every single great idea that fuelled the driving force of the 19th century – freedom, human greatness, compassion, but also the subcurrents of history uncovered by contemporaries, such as the ...”

“... Speak You Also is a very literary work – the title comes from Celan, the ‘happy few’ from Stendhal, and great expectations tells its own story, in a way – but it is interestingly haphazard in its ambition and its allusiveness (Levi is always sure, as a writer, about what goes where). That you had to be a new kind of new kind of person to survive in ...”

“... Julien Sorel and Fabrice del Dongo are perhaps the outstanding examples. Andersen was no Stendhal, just as the comparison with Dickens ends where an account of the latter’s greatness begins, with his power as a novelist and his willingness to take us to places Andersen’s vision could not have coped with. Yet Andersen’s refusal to grow up in the ...”

“... at the time – in order to free his beloved from waiting on the other lodgers. As Proust and Stendhal knew, there is no end to the absurdity and humiliation a lover will incur in the pursuit of his mistress, but this never makes him lose the friendship his reader entertains for him. He has been fortunate in the friends who came to him in posterity, as he ...”

“... Charles Nodier and Jules Verne. The blurb to the present translation speaks of an affinity with ‘Stendhal or Fielding, with glances towards Verne or Borges’. My own strong feeling, though, is that the inspiration was most probably Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist. In his great novel, Diderot celebrated the revolt of the narrator against the reader. His ...”

“... have left your touching appeal unanswered for so long. But I have been on congé in the patrie of Stendhal, and had cognizance of your gène only yesterday. You do me too much honour in asking me to come to the rescue of an artist such as you. And if I could have known of the situation 3 weeks ago when I had money in my pocket I should not have hesitated for ...”

“... which is not surprising, given that its author was someone for whom, as Simone de Beauvoir said, Stendhal was as important as Spinoza. In politics too, even in his Maoist or anarchist phases, Sartre was a traditionalist. He can be compared with Zola (whom he had reread during the Occupation) or with Mauriac (whom he detested) in so far as he used the ...”

“... principles to their stock of ideas: Goethe, Heine, Herder, Novalis, Jean Paul, Madame de Staël, Stendhal, George Sand. Many English writers, resisting the fanaticism with which phrenology was being promoted (George Combe’s The Constitution of Man, the central manifesto of the cult, sold 50,000 copies between 1835 and 1838 alone), preferred the more ...”

“... A la Recherche, Scott-Moncrieff took refuge in the altogether shorter and more urgent sentences of Stendhal, and in the plays of Pirandello. If he was drawn so greatly to Proust this may have been for technical rather than temperamental reasons, for he was not, by all accounts, a Proust-like man: but the awesome elaboration of Proust’s style, and the ...”