“... Gorey was reading by the age of three and at eight had begun working his way through the complete Victor Hugo, for reasons he could not in later life reconstruct. His parents’ unhappy marriage, their divorce and (much later) remarriage, were no doubt unsettling, but there was no Gothic horror in his upbringing of the sort that his more literal-minded ...”

“... religious idiom, a life in accord with God’s natural laws. (‘Gluttony punishes the glutton,’ Victor Hugo wrote in Les Misérables: ‘Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.’) Relax, take a walk in the country, eat moderately and slowly, avoid intoxicating drinks and stimulants, get what’s now called the work-life ...”

“... the men of 2 December 1851 – surely Napoleon III is a villain only for simple-minded readers of Victor Hugo? – and finally the Versaillais (can one really class Thiers with the Vendéens?). This kind of jumble may be excused as the result of hasty writing, but is untenable from the historical point of view. In the same way, explaining popular unity ...”

“... he has a very Nineties sense of Shakespeare’s different significances across Europe, claiming Victor Hugo as an ally in his bid to have the Bard recognised as not just Britain’s but the EU’s national (or supranational) poet; and, unusually for a Shakespearean scholar, he writes conspicuously well about post-Shakespearean music, not just the usual ...”

“... with table manners. Balzac pumped him for information on organised crime and political espionage. Victor Hugo used him as a model for Jean Valjean, the reformed convict of Les Misérables, and also, recognising Vidocq’s versatility, for Valjean’s maniacally principled pursuer, Inspector Javert. In the 1830s and 1840s, Vidocq was called back to the ...”

“... are the novel sects that sprang up out of Western intercourse, hybrid faiths, one of them with Victor Hugo ensconced in its pantheon. Possibly the same receptivity, of a people perpetually forced by necessity to innovate and borrow, helped to make Vietnam in our century so open to Marxism. But the events of the French occupation may suggest that ...”

“... this, his induction, first into the world of literature forbidden by the seminary, from Zola and Victor Hugo to Tolstoy and Saltykov-Shchedrin, and then into the world of revolution. While Stalin was still a seminarian (he dropped out at the age of 20), and before he became known as a revolutionary, he made something of a reputation as a poet, writing ...”

“... the afflicted were one of the sights. ‘On comprend les crétins dont [pullule] la Suisse,’ Victor Hugo wrote from Bern in 1839. ‘Les Alpes font beaucoup d’idiots.’ Mark Twain, in 1880, reported the words of an English traveller: ‘I have seen the principal features of Swiss scenery – Mount Blanc and the goitre – now for ...”

“... Minister. But that was only the start of such dalliance. The Express proprietor at the time was Victor Matthews, a builder and property-developer. Matthews was apparently desperate for an honour, and not best pleased when Junor got one first. But he didn’t have to wait too long. For the editor went selflessly to work among his cronies. The Prime ...”

“... he wrote as if his modern French models had never existed. More than that, he wrote as if Victor Hugo had never existed. The tightly focused language which Eliot and Pound discovered and coveted in the French moderns was simply not what attracted Brennan. The proof is in his unshaken capacity to compose with the English equivalent of the full ...”

“... public. The most difficult thing to come to terms with, then, is that Tolstoy did not believe, as Victor Hugo more conveniently did, that a commitment to social or spiritual progress could be achieved through huge novels earning vast advances and aimed at entertaining the middle classes. If anything, Tolstoy had come to see literature, with its ...”

“... behind them, are these: ‘Short History of Old Art’, ‘Perhaps So’, two translations from Victor Hugo, ‘The Dying of a Long Lost Lover’, ‘Hill of the Bees’, ‘A Myth Enacted’, ‘Slow Bell from the High Hill’, ‘John Hunter’s Canal’, ‘The Lawn of Trees and Rocks’, ‘Quelle Histoire’, and (an unusual exertion of ...”

“... while others were calling it a ‘breakthrough’. What would they have made of the nude Victor Hugo in plaster in the Luxembourg Garden? Or ‘The Kiss’ (‘Rather too suggestive’?) in marble. Unfailingly, one would have heard judgments as to what was permissible and impermissible in art. James himself, however unversed in politics he might ...”

“... She was not so much a Muse, though that was how she was known, as a confidante of great men: Victor Cousin, Hugo, Mussel, Vigny. Yet she lacked a sense of self-preservation; she could have lived with either Cousin or Vigny and been comfortable and cared for. In fact, she was fallible and perhaps less than ...”

“... move him to use ‘shudder’ as a laudatory critical term? Of course we may say that Victor Hugo had already done this when he told Baudelaire that in writing Les Fleurs du mal he was creating ‘un frisson nouveau’. And many of us remember the days when ‘the metaphysical shudder’ was a stock term in discussions of Donne and his ...”