One Herring in a Shoal

John Sturrock: Raymond Queneau, 8 May 2003

Oeuvres complètes: Tome II: Romans I 
by Raymond Queneau, edited by Henri Godard.
Gallimard, 1760 pp., €68, April 2002, 2 07 011439 2
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... 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 ...

In a Pomegranate Chandelier

T.J. Clark: Benedict Anderson, 21 September 2006

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism 
by Benedict Anderson.
Verso, 240 pp., £12.99, September 2006, 1 84467 086 4
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Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination 
by Benedict Anderson.
Verso, 224 pp., £14.99, January 2006, 1 84467 037 6
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... Illustrious Son-or-Daughter of the People) with all the certainty of Fielding or Stendhal. Already in Imagined Communities, Rizal’s first book is Anderson’s preferred example of all that a novel’s way of world-making can do, and what the mass ceremony of its reading (through the years) made thinkable. But Rizal presents a problem, which ...

Platinum Noses

Raymond N. MacKenzie: Jules Verne’s Fantasy, 9 July 2026

Journey to the Moon 
by Jules Verne, translated by David Coward with William Butcher.
Oxford, 353 pp., £9.99, August 2025, 978 0 19 894178 1
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... in 1861 or 1862, Verne met Hetzel, who had published a wide range of authors, including Stendhal and Balzac. A lifelong republican, Hetzel had participated in the 1848 revolution and served as Lamartine’s chief of staff during the period of the provisional government; following Louis-Napoléon’s coup in 1851, he fled to Belgium, publishing from ...

Deleecious

Matthew Bevis: William Hazlitt, 6 November 2008

New Writings of William Hazlitt: Volume I 
edited by Duncan Wu.
Oxford, 507 pp., £120, September 2007, 978 0 19 923573 5
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New Writings of William Hazlitt: Volume II 
edited by Duncan Wu.
Oxford, 553 pp., £120, September 2007, 978 0 19 923574 2
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William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man 
by Duncan Wu.
Oxford, 557 pp., £25, October 2008, 978 0 19 954958 0
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... Hazlitt’s dealings with Coleridge, Hunt, Keats, Lamb, William Godwin, Edmund Kean, Turner and Stendhal (to name just a few). The biography shows us a situated yet itinerant Hazlitt, seeking out companionship and quarrels in equal measure. Reading these pages, one often registers the force of the figure splendidly described by Robert Louis Stevenson: ‘a ...

Diary

Perry Anderson: Forget about Paris, 23 January 2014

... of Dickens does in London. Equally memorable are his depictions of Saumur, Angoulême or Tours. In Stendhal and Flaubert, the narratives of Le Rouge et le noir and Madame Bovary depend on Besançon and Rouen. In the 20th century, cinema has relayed the tradition. The extreme example is Eric Rohmer, whose Comédies et proverbes and Contes des quatre saisons ...

God wielded the buzzer

Christian Lorentzen: The Sorrows of DFW, 11 October 2012

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace 
by D.T. Max.
Granta, 352 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 1 84708 494 1
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... Dune; by the age of 11 he was mowing a neighbour’s lawn in exchange for a tutorial on Stendhal. It was around this time that his parents gave him his own television set. He watched everything: sitcoms, game shows, Star Trek, soap operas. Among his surviving childhood writings are parodies of jingles: ‘Burpo Soda’ had ‘the taste of wetness ...

Carry on writing

Stephen Bann, 15 March 1984

The Two of Us 
by John Braine.
Methuen, 183 pp., £7.95, March 1984, 0 413 51280 0
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An Open Prison 
by J.I.M. Stewart.
Gollancz, 192 pp., £7.95, February 1984, 0 575 03380 0
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Havannah 
by Hugh Thomas.
Hamish Hamilton, 263 pp., £9.95, February 1984, 0 241 11175 7
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Sunrising 
by David Cook.
Secker, 248 pp., £8.50, February 1984, 0 436 10674 4
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Memoirs of an Anti-Semite 
by Gregor von Rezzori, translated by Joachim Neugroschel.
Picador, 282 pp., £7.95, January 1984, 0 330 28325 1
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It’s me, Eddie 
by Edward Limonov, translated by S.L. Campbell.
Picador, 264 pp., £7.95, March 1984, 0 330 28329 4
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The Anatomy Lesson 
by Philip Roth.
Cape, 291 pp., £8.95, February 1984, 0 224 02960 6
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... had betrayed his troth and was now living on without character. Describing the achievement of Stendhal in passing from the purely anecdotal form of his Italian reminiscences to the ‘mythic’ achievement of La Chartreuse de Parme, Roland Barthes comments that to make a myth ‘there must be the action of two forces.’ Gregor von Rezzori (the author and ...

Diary

August Kleinzahler: Remembering Thom Gunn, 4 November 2004

... over. Not that he didn’t stray to the Continent, also like the Englishman he was. He was mad for Stendhal, especially The Charterhouse of Parma, also Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens meant quite as much to him as Donne or Marvell or Keats, all of whom meant a great deal. And at least one summer and fall were devoted to ...

The Force of the Anomaly

Perry Anderson: Carlo Ginzburg, 26 April 2012

Threads and Traces: True False Fictive 
by Carlo Ginzburg, translated by Anne Tedeschi and John Tedeschi.
California, 328 pp., £20.95, January 2012, 978 0 520 25961 4
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... Dante, Boccaccio, More, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Bayle, Voltaire, Sterne, Diderot, David, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Warburg, Proust, Kracauer, Picasso and many more, each an extraordinary display of learning. No other living historian approaches the range of this erudition. Every page of Threads and Traces, his latest work to appear in ...

Who Whips Whom

Leland de la Durantaye: Sade, 19 February 2015

Justine et autres romans 
by D.A.F. de Sade, edited by Michel Delon and Jean Deprun.
Gallimard, 1152 pp., €60, October 2014, 978 2 07 014669 7
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... of Sade are debatable, though the same could be said of the accounts of those from Balzac to Stendhal, Flaubert to Baudelaire, Swinburne to Huysmans who had praised Sade before him. But Apollinaire was unquestionably right about Sade’s spirit being preternaturally resistant to intimidation. The first real report we have of the character of the young ...

Diary

Marina Warner: Literary Diplomacy, 16 November 2017

... labouring to drain the sea appeared to him on the beach at Civitavecchia near Rome, the port where Stendhal was the French consul 14 centuries later. The story lives on in local memory and is marked by a monument on the beach near an ugly, modern church where the Madonna wept tears of blood for the world in the 1990s. Augustine, for all the dark and dismal ...

The War between the Diaries

John Bayley, 5 December 1985

Tolstoy’s Diaries 
translated by R.F. Christian.
Athlone, 755 pp., £45, October 1985, 0 485 11276 0
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The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy 
translated by Cathy Porter.
Cape, 1043 pp., £30, September 1985, 0 224 02270 9
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... contrary, I have a terrible aversion to all that. This is straightforward enough. Shakespeare and Stendhal probably had the same sort of feelings, and Tolstoy had them on the same scale as he had everything else. But it is easy to see why his wife hated Chertkov so much. Nothing could be more infuriating than a man like that whom your husband was always ...

In a horizontal posture

Ruth Bernard Yeazell, 5 July 1984

The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford: 1836-1854 
edited by Meredith Raymond and Mary Rose Sullivan.
Baylor University, Browning Institute, Wedgestone Press and Wellesley College, 431 pp., March 1983, 0 911459 01 4
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Love and the Woman Question in Victorian Literature: The Art of Self-Postponement 
by Kathleen Blake.
Harvester, 254 pp., £25, November 1983, 0 7108 0560 8
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... celebrated Flush, offspring of her own beloved spaniel.) For Barrett, who read avidly in Balzac, Stendhal, Eugène Sue and the elder Dumas, as well as Hugo and Sand, this was a literature whose ‘poetry’ and greatness were undeniable – despite its ‘monstrous & hideous morality’: ‘They light me up, & make me feel alive to the ends of my ...

Hate, Greed, Lust and Doom

Sean O’Faolain, 16 April 1981

William Faulkner: His Life and Work 
by David Minter.
Johns Hopkins, 325 pp., £9.50, January 1981, 0 8018 2347 1
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... any novel based on it small room for such wilful characters as we are familiar with in Balzac, or Stendhal, or Henry James, or Mark Twain. Malraux went so far as to say that Faulkner conceived his situations in a void without thinking of any character at all, pre-imagining ‘l’écrasement des personnages inconnus’. By writing in terms of myth or saga he ...

A Good Reason to Murder Your Landlady

Terry Eagleton: I.A. Richards, 25 April 2002

I.A. Richards: Selected Works 1919-38 
edited by John Constable.
Routledge, 595 pp., December 2001, 0 415 21731 8
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... the literary would have come as something of a surprise to Dante, Pope, Voltaire, Austen, Goethe, Stendhal and Tolstoy; but most of these authors were foreigners, and though other nations may speak of a literary science, the English prefer to define the timeless essence of the literary in terms that have been current only for about two hundred years in a ...