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“... while writing Bleak House. It, too, suggests that the Victorian virus never struck randomly: ‘Gustave Flaubert used to say that he suffered with his characters even as he created them, that he became invaded by nervous anxiety at the same time as his characters, and even shared in the agony induced by the arsenic poisoning of Emma Bovary. Dickens’s ...”

“... raw material, squeezes it into novelty-shaped moulds and palms it off as the real thing. Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) is really just a ground up thesis, seasoned, reconstituted and skewered on a long, thin story. A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989) is a series of little oyster-like essays set in the vast grey, greasy sea of history and The ...”

“... or Gauguin; only one letter to Renoir is here. Some of the exchanges are partial, like that with Gustave Moreau, whose friendship was vital when both men were young and aspiring in Italy; they knew one another for decades, but the only four extant letters to Moreau all date from 1858-59. At the other extreme there are an enormous number of letters – twice ...”

“... Perhaps repelled by the way 19th-century crowd psychologists such as Hippolyte Taine and Gustave Le Bon analysed – and demonised – the ‘savage’ and ‘irrational’ revolutionary mobs, most of them rejected all historical applications of psychoanalysis as inherently unreliable. Yet as Peter Gay has aptly pointed out, insofar as every ...”

“... it was written. Consider Robbe-Grillet’s 1962 story ‘La Chambre secrète’, dedicated to Gustave Moreau. It begins: ‘The first thing to be seen is a red stain, of a deep, dark, shiny red, with almost black shadows. It is in the form of an irregular rosette, sharply outlined, extending in several directions in wide outflows of unequal ...”