“... loved the French realists, and Tolstoy who looked down on them. ‘The French have three writers: Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert. There is also Maupassant, of course, but Chekhov is better. As for the Goncourts – what clowns they are! They merely feign seriousness. They learned life from books written by such fabulists as themselves, believing it all to be ...”

“... followers of the extremist, anti-Semitic Action Française. The young Mitterrand devoured Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, as well as French translations of Faulkner, Joyce and Hemingway; later, as an adult, taken with the notion of ancestral soil, he sometimes seemed closer, aesthetically and intellectually, to the nationalist writer Maurice Barrès. He ...”

“... time for him than he for it. Unlike another proudly alienated writer of an earlier generation, Stendhal, Flaubert did not comfort himself for the misapprehensions of the present by imagining his success in a more intelligent and hospitable future. He comforted himself by taking the present on, as a weak, effeminate age that called for violent literary ...”

“... and French artists, were fortunate to have the backing of some of the best writers of the day. Stendhal, Baudelaire, Gautier, Goncourt, Zola, Maupassant, Huysmans and Mallarmé all doubled up as art critics. (The bullish Courbet took on both tasks: doing the work and the self-promotion.) It helped that there were extraordinary new artists to support, as ...”

“... or a minute calibration of fashion. John Berryman once said to a friend: ‘Doesn ‘t reading Stendhal make you feel intelligent!’ The same is true of Hazlitt; and the justified praise of Paulin’s book is that the compliment to our amour-propre survives his exploration to a generous degree. Reading him on Hazlitt, you never feel ‘Isn ‘t he being ...”

“... Onegin begs for Rossini’s treatment, then Pushkin’s life seems to have resembled a libretto by Stendhal with music by Mozart. The extraordinary wealth of Binyon’s research – his biography represents a true lifework, a long simmering of scholarship – only confirms the sense one already had of Pushkin’s maniacal libidinousness, his swaggering ...”

“... or ugly, worthy of our effort to find it or not. Beauty is the enemy of certainty. If beauty, as Stendhal said, is a promise of happiness, it is a very dangerous one. We may fail to find the promised thing, and end up bitter and disappointed; worse, we may succeed, and find a happiness which might have seemed contemptible before we began to pursue it: but by ...”

“... was no accident that Powell’s first critical project, when he was in his twenties, was a book on Stendhal, at a time when no Anglophone study yet existed. There was a further element in this distance from any standard Englishry. Powell’s literary culture was unusually wide. In this country, it is difficult to think of any contemporary novelist who matched ...”

“... is no law or government at all; and it is wonderful how well things go on without them.’ Stendhal, who knew the country better, felt at times that ‘music alone is alive in Italy, and all that is to be made in this beautiful land is love; the other enjoyments of the soul are spoilt; one dies poisoned of melancholy as a citizen.’ Yet Italians were ...”

“... which most gives it interest and meaning. Pepys does that, and Rousseau, and Chateaubriand, and Stendhal in La Vie de Henri Brulard, and Newman and Ruskin and Hardy – all the way down to Anthony Powell in his Memoirs and the just published diaries of Barbara Pym. Indeed this contribution to the state of the art by a humbler sister in the fiction business ...”

“... the houses and clear out the village. This began in 1823 and was mostly accomplished by 1844; when Stendhal visited the city in 1837, there were still a few of what he calls ‘poor dwellings’ inside the walls. Despite these remaining houses, the first event to take place in the arena after (most of) the clearing was a race of the bulls in 1830, held in ...”

“... why Brideshead? Bedford said that as a teenager she did dabble in writing French, ‘like Stendhal’, but quickly realised that if she was going to be a writer she needed ‘one firm language’ to do it in. ‘My attachment to England was instinctive, a bid for, if not roots, a kind of self-preservation … I held onto the English language as the ...”

“... of Dostoevsky, Doctor Zhivago, Thomas Mann, Faulkner, George Eliot, Klebnikov, War and Peace, Stendhal and Cervantes, Boyd explains, ‘particularly liked reading bad literature aloud – “I can’t stop quoting!” he would chortle with glee.’ His ebullience and self-delight were clearly a trial to Edmund Wilson, who, though a generous supporter of ...”

“... This can never be said of Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, in this country. Nor abroad of Hugo, Stendhal, Balzac, even Flaubert, of Manzoni, and of all the Russians except Chekhov, who was relatively non-committal. The talkative novelist was evidently the norm and always had been. In America, those who have survived – chiefly Melville and Hawthorne ...”

“... be his last). Frémaux seems to like reading. In Sélection officielle, he cites Salman Rushdie, Stendhal and Charlie Hebdo, but also Anna Akhmatova and Flannery O’Connor. His interests include football, Bruce Springsteen and the city of Lyon, where he grew up. He takes judo seriously enough to have written a book about it. He is an obsessive cyclist: he ...”