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“... mentioned doing something ‘à la Radcliffe’), and Cazotte, Beckford, Sade, Charles Nodier and Jules Verne. The blurb to the present translation speaks of an affinity with ‘Stendhal or Fielding, with glances towards Verne or Borges’. My own strong feeling, though, is that the inspiration was most probably ...”

“... with Lourdes water. His Notre-Dame de Lourdes sold over a million copies: more than Victor Hugo, Jules Verne or Alexandre Dumas; more probably than any other book published in France in the 19th century. It ran to 142 editions in just seven years; was translated into 80 languages and remained in print until the Sixties. It did so well because it was ...”

“... judgments and to do the right thing. His childhood imagination was fired by Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, W.W. Jacobs’s story ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ – and there’s still a well-behaved French schoolboy inside him who delights in weird tales of human oddity, pirate ships, revenants and Captain Nemo. In a constellation of freakish ...”

“... or Dostoevsky, much preferring Dumas’s swashbuckling romances, the scientific fantasies of Jules Verne and the charms of Western cowboy stories (Verne’s story of polar exploration was read to him on his deathbed). But his career well fits those of the great Russian novelists’ imaginings. Towards the end of ...”

“... serve. And even though his skies and seas can no longer support the imaginative projections of a Jules Verne or a Peter Scheerbart, they are still returned to us, at least in part, as worlds to marvel at. In fact ‘the fading of the sensible’ in machine vision allows for the sublime extension of both space and time suggested in his art. For me the ...”

“... at No 202 is a cross between the ultimate self-indulgence of Des Esseintes, and something out of Jules Verne. The mood, as befits an epic – or rather mock-epic – of progress, is consistently hyperbolic. Returning from Portugal after a seven-year sojourn abroad, Zé Fernandes finds No 202 cluttered with the latest inventions ...”

“... executed with consummate skill and an unerring feeling for the volume control. His epigraph, from Jules Verne – ‘Nothing can astound an American’ – prepares us for the layers of romantic irony surrounding a remarkably ingenious narrative. The physical location of much of the novel is upper Manhattan, yet Moon Palace is haunted by the landscapes ...”

“... conceived novel, Moon Palace, Auster gave a grim Beckettian turn to the epigraph from Jules Verne, ‘Nothing can astound an American,’ giving the deserts of the West an actual as well as metaphorical power to reduce the native zing of his characters. In The Music of Chance again – as, one might say, in Polanski’s Chinatown – an ...”

“... figures in Polish literature, the greatest non-English-language science fiction writer between Jules Verne and Cixin Liu, born a hundred years ago … The trouble – beyond the fact that I’ve dawdled beyond that anniversary – is, well, everything. All the unstated premises, all the undefined terms (especially ‘science fiction’). As my ...”

“... in which the conquest of space gathered momentum: the world of Disney and Destination Moon, of Jules Verne and Mr Spock, of the notorious ‘canals’ on Mars, of Arthur C. Clarke and the science fiction painter Chesley Bonestell, of battles between the engineer-and-scientist lobby that wants a Moonbase first and Mars Underground, the lobby within ...”

“... earlier, the country’s most widely read writer was born in the city. The planetary imaginary of Jules Verne – second only to Agatha Christie in number of works translated worldwide – was nurtured in a port where clippers still docked. But though naturally honoured in Nantes, where his statue presides over its botanical gardens, he retained no ...”

“... to be found on the shelves of their fathers’ studies. They were also attached to Jack London and Jules Verne; they were romantics who embraced the real-life sagas of polar explorers with the same fervour as the fictional adventures of Verne’s Children of Captain Grant. You might think that the sudden arrest of their ...”

“... magus, a figment comparable with those dreamed up by the writer whom Roussel most revered, Jules Verne. He enjoys an inordinate power both over things and, through his words, over people. For not only is Canterel the creator of an awesome science-park, he is also a guide with a positively orphic ability to charm, ‘one of the champions of the ...”

“... liked to have been told what young Alex read and if, for example, such typical boys’ reading as Jules Verne and the short stories of H.G. Wells stoked his enthusiasm for a career in science, and I should also like to know how he came to write so well in the straightforward narrative style of Daniel Defoe. But on all these matters we are left to ...”

“... of the legend. Robert Escarpit feels that Byron has not mattered much to Frenchmen, except to Jules Verne and himself. But in Poland he has meant a great deal, as a model Romantic nationalist: indeed, you catch the 19th-century poet Adam Mickiewicz and the 20th-century scholar Professor Windakiewicz wondering if in some sense he was a Pole. In ...”