“... of the unbelievable cold. The French title of the second volume, Il neigeait, is taken from Victor Hugo’s great poem about Napoleon, ‘L’Expiation’, which has much the same place in French culture that ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ holds in British. But Rambaud, unlike Hugo, sketches a war – and ...”

“... general, slices of his legendary life. Leo (Design for Living), Charles Condomine (Blithe Spirit), Hugo Latymer (A Song at Twilight) are all smooth, successful writers. Garry Essendine (Present Laughter), George Pepper (‘Red Peppers’ from Tonight at 8.30) and Elyot Chase, a man of no apparent metier in Private Lives who nonetheless manages a dance and a ...”

“... it declares. The Detective Novel, the Companion tells us, was pioneered by women (Metta Victor and Anna Katharine Green) ‘before Conan Doyle’. The entry on the Novel is similarly chauvinistic: ‘Recent scholarship has confirmed that women took the lead among the earliest novelists.’ One could mock this as being like preglasnost history of ...”

“... Les Jeunes France and their sympathisers who set up the famous battle at the opening night of Victor Hugo’s play Hernani were, like their counterparts in Young England, more style than substance. The battle itself was a defence of the Romantic against the Classical theatre but it was as staged as the play, the participants madly self-conscious and ...”

“... Friend into long, lavishly illustrated digressions on figures like Stuart Davis, Ben Shahn and Hugo Gellert. What is particularly interesting here is the light shed on the ways in which the Cold War and state funding affected artists’ trajectories.The great mural-painting projects of the 1930s in the US were owed not just to the efforts of activist ...”

“... to study the language, she decided to quit her job. Within two years she was reading Voltaire, Hugo, Camus and Sartre, and Americans like Faulkner and Hemingway in translation. Late in life she claimed she ‘wasn’t much influenced’ by the French classics, saying that she found Proust ‘too boring’. Yet it was through reading French authors ...”

“... women lifting their skirts on the barricades as soldiers open fire (an incident from Victor Hugo’s Choses vues), but a rearguard action against insecurity and the erosion of rights – to jobs, housing, public services, freedom of movement, asylum. For Sante, one suspects, the jig is already up. He is depressed by the tendency of big ...”

“... there is but one tense, and all ages in her sight are alike present,’ he asserted in a review of Victor Hugo’s L’Année terrible, and this must have been one source of T.S. Eliot’s idea of artistic tradition – and modernist technique – as a ‘simultaneous present’. In ‘On the Cliffs’ (1880), Swinburne experimented with blending ...”

“... to my brother Alexander. Bear with me. Roy’s wife, Valerie, was godmother to my younger brother, Hugo (technically, he is my half-brother), and Valerie and Roy’s eldest son, another Alexander, was Donald’s godson. Two families roped together in friendship and event. Alexander, who is now sixty, lives quite close to me in London, but I haven’t seen much ...”