“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... man and hailed his rational choice-making capacity as freedom. A century and a half after Stendhal denounced the materialism of the French bourgeoisie, economic growth in general was posited as the end-all of political life and the chief marker of progress worldwide. Unlike in the 1820s, those who claimed that a culture of money-making advanced the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”