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“... Pirandellian tension, the feeling that Hamlet never belongs in the play he inhabits but seems, as Victor Hugo put it, like a somnambulist. He addresses the Western imagination with extraordinary power, but never addresses his own situation with as much intellectual acuity as we might confidently expect from a Banquo. If this is true, it is not surprising ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that her son is destined for fame. In France, she tells him, he will become ‘a d’Annunzio, a Victor Hugo, a Nobel Prize winner’, and an ambassador who has his suits made in London. When the war comes, she’s certain he’ll cover himself in glory, and her letters, filled with stirring generalities, sustain his fighting spirit. But there’s a ...”

“... subjected his children to a strict regime of supplementary classes in French at 6 a.m. and read Victor Hugo to them at night.Césaire began writing Return to My Native Land on holiday on Yugoslavia’s Adriatic coast during the summer of 1935. He was 22. Earlier that year, he had published an essay in the journal L’Étudiant noir in which he railed ...”

“... its official history seems to need the reassurance of those novelists – Stendhal, Dumas, Balzac, Hugo, Zola – who tried their hand at storytelling.This anthology is the latest Penguin national showcase (volumes of Italian, Spanish and British stories have already appeared). It opens with a group of tales from the late 15th century, often seen as the first ...”

“... his advice that she marry the philosopher (and inventor of the phrase ‘Art for art’s sake’) Victor Cousin. But the real disaster was his advice to his adored niece Caroline. He conspired with old Mme Flaubert to dissuade her from making a bohemian liaison with her drawing teacher, Johanny Maisiat, with whom she was in love, and urged her to marry Ernest ...”

“... limp and ravaged. Among the Bernhardt breakout roles: Doña Marie, the tragic Queen of Spain in Hugo’s Ruy Blas (1872); Racine’s Andromaque (1873) and Phèdre (1874); Doña Sol in Hugo’s Hernani (1877); Marguerite in La Dame aux camélias (1880); Adrienne Lecouvreur, in Scribe and Legouvé’s eponymous tear-jerker ...”

“... seemed to bring the nation together, as Ben-Amos suggests. The Pantheonisation in 1885 of Victor Hugo, the first burial there for over half a century, was a spectacular public ritual attended by many hundreds of thousands. The various stopping places were elaborately staged; there was media attention galore and later a civically appropriate spin ...”

“... complete works again of Count Leo Tolstoy’, Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Thackeray, Victor Hugo, Flaubert, Balzac and ‘any unflinching book on the World War’ – suggests that Salinger, whose forty-year silence followed its appearance, may have reached the same conclusion. But maybe not. Salinger’s enthusiasm for his characters is ...”

“... Where the Palliser version acquires more credence is with the arrival in power of the future victor in the Falklands War. As these witnesses plot the story, the Thatcher Government consciously chose to neglect the obscurely festering problem. Settling Rhodesia became not only the prime objective of post-colonial diplomacy but the only front on which ...”

“... the dormant faculties of women than embroidery and domestic drudgery.’ She was then reviewing Victor Cousin’s Madame de Sablé, and Cousin had been briefly the lover of a woman whom Marian Evans (or George Eliot) already knew, and was to know better: Mary Clarke Mohl, whose style of writing and life might epitomise Marian Evans’s trenchant early views ...”

“... to an allusion. In the library episode of Ulysses, Mr Best does his best to insert an allusion to Victor Hugo into the torrent of Stephen’s Shakespearean speculation: ‘The art of being a grandfather, Mr Best gan murmur. L’art d’être grand ... ’ But the title of Hugo’s volume of verse for children is ...”

“... and perhaps this needs a little explanation. Even when he shows vast social forces in motion (like Victor Hugo or Manzoni or Tolstoy), the novelist’s care is for individual destinies, and it seems to be proper to the novel that they should be small destinies. Not the kings and noblemen of the tragic theatre or the witty bloods of comedy but Renzo and ...”

“... French la gloire) would be his: ‘I was the equal of Dante and of Shakespeare, I was feeling what Victor Hugo had felt when he was 70, what Napoleon had felt in 1811 and what Tannhäuser had felt while musing on Venusberg.’ These recollections were confided to Pierre Janet, the psychiatrist who wrote up Roussel’s case in From Anxiety to Ecstasy ...”

“... sees the darkly charismatic (in other words, charlatanesque) Charcot as a character out of Victor Hugo, but he is perhaps closer to Fellini. The Salpêtrière was a Cinecittà containing five thousand inmates or extras, a select few of whom performed their symptoms for the benefit of an interested audience. If, as Christopher Bollas says, ‘the ...”