“... 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 ...”

“... a shining and somewhat implausible exception to the venality and hypocrisy of the literary world. Stendhal’s exposures of the inauthenticity of language lead logically to the fulfilment-in-silence which rounds off his novels: both Julien and Fabrice eventually find their true identity as prisoners in solitary confinement about whom nothing can any longer be ...”

“... by irony and a hatred of humbug; it is not surprising that the favourite novelist of both men was Stendhal. Above all, they share the obsession with their island, its people, its condition and its perennial problems. They were, after all, the only major Sicilian writers since Italian unification who remained there. Verga, De Roberto and Vittorini went to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Companion to the Arts, you’ll be out of luck. Hard on the heels of Gertrude Stein comes Stendhal. I only read Travels with Charley very recently, I suppose because I knew I would be making what would likely be my own last big road trip. I’m in the pink, don’t get me wrong, but I’m not big on road trips and hadn’t really made one in 35 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in a city with an atmosphere of perpetual carnival. Caracole has epigraphs from George Eliot and Stendhal, and its tone is set by White’s ability to recreate the burnished prose of a more elegant age; at times it has the air of a classic novel translated from the French. L’amour, in White’s hands, is the subject both of fervid description (as in some ...”

“... shapes the novel, sex provides the commentary: a facile arrangement, perhaps, but effective. Like Stendhal, Kundera categorises with engaging relish the different sorts of womaniser, notably those whose obsession is lyrical, founded on a romantic ideal which is continually disappointed and continually reborn, and the epic womaniser, ‘whose inability to be ...”

“... 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 ...”