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“... simple but powerful idea: to follow nine contemporary intellectuals – d’Agoult, the novelists George Sand, Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert, the statesman Lamartine, the liberal theorist and parliamentarian Alexis de Tocqueville and the socialists Karl Marx, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Alexander Herzen – into the revolution, link arms with them as ...”

“... largely complete, is probably the third most important exchange after those with Louise Colet and George Sand; and it comes from the mellower end of Flaubert’s tonal spectrum. The letters to Louise are almost wholly combative: he fights against being in love with her, he fights against seeing her (true lovers, he informed her, can go ten years without ...”

“... all he was content to show, for more than thirty years of story-writing. One thinks, he said, of George Sand turning out volume after volume while never once neglecting a love affair, never missing one puff of her hookah. Well, no matter, O’Faolain has done many other things and written many other books besides his collections of stories. He has ...”

“... an injustice by her ‘much-quoted remark’ that her motive had been to gain as much publicity as George Sand, who had scandalised Chamonix by turning up in her ‘ideologically significant male garb, accompanied by a youth dressed as a woman’. In her book Henriette’s explanation runs to waffle: ‘The soul has needs, as does the body, peculiar to ...”

“... them seems to have broken off relations completely. A ‘very hard’ letter from her ‘dearest George’ was awaiting her in ‘a great packet’ when the couple reached Orléans, but friendlier exchanges eventually followed. Included in that first dreaded packet – her ‘death warrant’ as she called it – was a letter from Mr Barrett himself. But ...”

“... favoured northern species for their rapid growth. Artists and writers, including Victor Hugo and George Sand, protested against the pine plantations, objecting, on both political and aesthetic grounds, to what they saw as a deformation of the landscape. Uprooting pine saplings was considered a defence of the forest and its poetic vision: for a time, you ...”

“... writers such as Nekrasov, Leskov, Belinsky and Tolstoy (not to mention a grateful obituary of George Sand, whose novels infiltrated subversive Utopian Socialist ideas into Russian culture during Dostoevsky’s youth and exercised an enormous influence). Dostoevsky’s Diary thus illuminates an entire stretch of Russian cultural history, and is ...”

“... Jane, who had received a threadbare fashionable education and had never, for example, heard of George Sand (‘Oh good, I’ll read him’), would have come across this particular comment, but the point is made and is significant. For the reality presented in the story is indeed hard to bear. Having accompanied her lover Pierre to France, Jane, a ...”

“... overboard in a storm after an agonising 12-hour wait for rescue when their ship foundered on a sand bar within sight of shore at Fire Island, near New York.Improvising on what might have been Fuller’s last thoughts, Lowell ends by transposing her famous formulation – ‘Ourselves are all we know of heaven’ – into an even more egocentric ...”

“... a 1945 biopic about Chopin. It’s significant that he remembers Merle Oberon, who played George Sand, and not Cornel Wilde, who played Chopin. She was more glamorous, but obviously Liberace had to be Chopin. It wasn’t the case that, as he once said, he played classical music with the boring bits left out. He converted classical music itself ...”

“... no need of a key to this choice roman – among them, Liszt, Chopin, Paganini, Hugo, Dumas, Vigny, George Sand, Heine and Gautier. How much Harriet herself perceived we shall never know, but if she was still awake by the fourth ‘monologue de l’artiste’ in Lélio, she can no longer have been in any doubt as to the identity of the heroine for whom the ...”

“... crosses, a telephone number and the words AMBULANCE FLAUBERT. The writer as healer? I remembered George Sand’s matronly rebuke to her younger colleague. ‘You produce desolation,’ she wrote, ‘and I produce consolation.’ The Peugeot should have read AMBULANCE GEORGE SAND. At the Hôtel-Dieu I was admitted ...”

“... extraordinary success was interpreted as an anomaly. She styled herself as a Romantic genius like George Sand, to whom she was constantly compared, and seemed to transcend the constraints of her sex.‘Women’s rights! – women’s nonsense!’ she complained in the 1850s. ‘Women should seek to establish their rights by good and great works, and not ...”

“... but few of his forty-odd books have lasted, apart from his study of Curzon, his lives of King George V and of Tennyson, and his Byron, The Last Phase. A word, too, should be said for his life of his father, Lord Carnock, which he regarded as his best achievement. He wrote with care and in an elegant, limpid style: but there are times when one is reminded ...”

“... alive to the charm of this ‘pépite’, or nugget, in the heart of Paris. Mérimée’s friend George Sand tipped him off about the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries hanging in the Château de Boussac, and he and Edmond Du Sommerard began the delicate process of acquiring them. The château belonged to the municipality of Creuse, and while it wasn’t ...”