“... of hostility, Abbott can be challenging and acute. It occurs to him, he writes while reading Stendhal, ‘that, in this existential age, the last vestiges of romanticism appear to us today (in social intercourse) as paranoia.’ We might suppose, however, that it was there from the first. His own relation to romanticism is deceptive. He seems here to be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... brings out well the reasons why Clausewitz can be read, among other ways, as a companion volume to Stendhal and Tolstoy. Like these writers on the Napoleonic wars, he emphasises the importance of accident and character in the waging of war. War cannot be wholly understood within the framework of instrumental rationality: for one thing, it is clouded in ...”

“... if any other Tory MP snatched the time to read and reread Proust, Balzac, Maupassant, Zola and Stendhal, while at the same time reading a good deal of Arabic and Persian literature – in the original. Eden was able to converse in good German with Hitler and in excellent French with a succession of French leaders, and to cite Arabic proverbs to ...”

“... chapters which tell how D’Artagnan foils Milady and rescues the Queen’s diamond studs? Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert were greater artists and are admired, even revered. But Dumas’s art and his personality are inseparable, and he is loved. After returning from Italy, he continued to spend words, money and energy freely. In February 1866, the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... concept of Nature to a society: a side of the novel that goes back through James to Flaubert and Stendhal, and through them again to the English Richardson, whose Clarissa Harlowe, heroine of the greatest romance and perhaps also the greatest novel in English, is the true ancestress of all Henry James’s sensitive heroines – even though James is unlikely ...”

“... it was precisely that very chasse au bonheur – the chase for love so clearly depicted in Stendhal – that would keep him interested in me.’ Holding back is exactly what Coover’s maid does in failing every time to perform perfectly. Every slip-up she makes is essential to the fulfilment of the narrator’s happiness, and a gift she freely brings ...”

“... if you were for the King, you were against country and put yourself outside the nation. When Stendhal heard of the King’s execution he experienced ‘one of the sharpest feelings of joy I have ever felt in my life’. This is all well and good, and not a few of us would wish that cutting off Charles I’s head had had the same results as cutting off ...”

“... the hard and clear outlines which emerge when an episode is sharply and unceremoniously curtailed. Stendhal has rightly been credited with good, rather than bad judgment in allowing Julien Sorel to attempt the assassination of Mme de Rênal when his motivation is hardly adequate. The effect is all the more telling because it exceeds the norm. Malouf will close ...”

“... might be called ‘structuralist’. The second half of this collection is devoted to essays on Stendhal, Flaubert and Proust, all of the Sixties; and it is these essays that should impress the party of Intelligence. Genette always starts from the data, from the fine perception of a variation in tense, or the placing of an adverb, or a relaxation of ...”

“... years earlier an attempt to introduce the Parisians to Shakespeare in English, as witnessed by Stendhal, was rewarded by the actors being driven off the stage with showers of apple cores, eggs, several pairs of sabots, and cries of ‘à bas Shakespeare! C’est un lieutenant de Wellington!’ Harriet seized the chance of playing Ophelia to Kemble’s ...”

“... resent his father and, just like another resentful provincial schoolboy, Henri Beyle, the future Stendhal, took shelter in mathematics, an escape-route into abstraction, where the appeal was always to reason, never to mere domestic precedence. His hostility towards his father supplies the propellant for his curious second novel, Gueule de pierre, which ...”

“... Mimesis, the one Auerbach himself summarises at the end, is that ‘serious realism’ began with Stendhal and Balzac; and also began earlier, with figural interpretation. It had to begin again because the classical period got in the way, with its hierarchical rules – ‘under no circumstances might a tragic hero appear physically ...”