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“... Spanish trickster of the titles. Beaumarchais has inspired scores of biographies, including Maurice Lever’s exhaustive and exhausting three-volume work, which his widow, along with the translator Susan Emanuel, has now boiled down to a much more manageable size. Beaumarchais was a manic character, of the sort who would now be diagnosed at a young ...”

“... After a telephone interview with the New York Times Book Review, one of his French biographers, Maurice Lever, was quoted as saying: ‘Sade was the first to dare to write about his own neuroses and obsessions. In that sense, he preceded Freud by a hundred years. He made us discover that the sexual instinct is anarchic and uncontrollable. After ...”

“... less than hospitable, it wasn’t altogether surprising that another gate opened, courtesy of Maurice Bowra and Lord David Cecil, to a fellowship at Oxford. The only begetter of the study of literary theory at Oxford, he became the subject’s best-known teacher there, the leading authority in the field in Britain, and one of its most acclaimed proponents ...”

“... the object represented. A good example of this is Onslow Ford’s haunting Snowdrift in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight. A bony, pre-pubescent, nude girl (a subject quite unknown to Classical art) sleeps in a feverish attitude upon a bed of snow which floats upon a glassy block of pale-green banded onyx. The tight and silky surface of the skin is ...”

“... many myths about the Palace: contrary to popular belief, there were lots of toilets; the famous lever and coucher ceremonies were apparently never central to the life that was led there; and there was little solar iconography. Indeed, the author tells us that the expression ‘Sun King’ is as apocryphal as the phrase ‘L’Etat c’est moi,’ though ...”