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“... their coffers and 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 ...”

“... in Cicero’s Latin but there is even more Latin in Levin’s English. Who does he think he is? Victor Hugo was under the impression that he was Victor Hugo. Bernard Levin feels the same way about Bernard Levin. He is never off his plinth. On Face the Music he takes a sip of water after getting the right ...”

“... on familiar rooftops and the thought that it might be used to send sinister secret messages. Victor Hugo wrote that he despised the ‘big black insect’ for its ugliness and meagre preoccupation with the affairs of the world, as well as for the ‘dark terror’ induced by its inscrutable transmissions. Later, Thomas Carlyle described the ...”

“... survives. The script suggests that Gance borrowed the image of the Convention as a storm from Victor Hugo, but the parallel must be all his. His conclusion of the scene invokes ‘the raging whirlpool of the Reign of Terror’ and ‘a man … being triumphantly carried to the heights of history’. There are many suggestions here. Bonaparte will ...”

“... sweating in the greenhouse effect of early Romanticism. Bright young (male) novelists agreed that Victor Hugo had set off on the right lines in Bug-Jargal or Notre Dame de Paris, but that he’d proved too tame: to out-sensationalise the only moderately sensational Hugo was the way they thought fiction should now ...”

“... was part of a thirty-year project to repair the church after the Revolution, and was championed by Victor Hugo among others. The recent restoration is a major event which has attracted little notice. Attention is instead focused on what is being undertaken at Chartres and at Notre-Dame, which has garnered astonishing ...”

“... than a nun’s bouquet’ could have been written by Lampedusa; so could his dismissal of Victor Hugo as a ‘real charlatan’. Like Don Fabrizio’s, the Senyor’s life oscillates between moments of sensuality and periods of austere contemplation. Like Don Fabrizio, he is a rationalist who knows that his class has no future. Convinced that the ...”

“... 19th centuries pass one another on the street:Sainte-Beuve, a tight bouquet in his hand for Madame Victor Hugo,Passes on the Pont-Neuf the duc de la Rochefoucauld            With a superbly leisurely gait            Making for the salon d’automne            Of Madame de Lafayette;            They cannot see each other.The present ...”

“... of 202 Labour MPs. This figure wasn’t any higher when Corbyn was leader. In Les Misérables, Victor Hugo described the Paris sewers as a ‘rout of illusions and mirages’, a place where ‘the filth takes off its shirt’ and ‘nothing is more but what is.’ Under Starmer, the Labour Party has been reclaimed from the Corbynists with such ...”

“... death!’ His daughter, Geneviève, remembered her father once saying that it had been easier for Victor Hugo, since he was at least able to write about his daughter’s death: ‘Hugo . . . is fortunate to have been able to speak, for me it is impossible.’ Mallarmé is a poet associated with silence, though rarely ...”

“... adapted to the point of view he wanted to put over. He revered Notre Dame de Paris, convinced that Victor Hugo had succeeded in embodying in the figure of Quasimodo the downtrodden French peasant’s awakening thirst for justice, truth and progress. In one of his Vremya articles he extravagantly praised Pushkin’s fragment in poetry and ...”

“... at the corner of the place des Vosges that I used to drop into after visiting the Musée Victor Hugo or the Follains’ apartment, completely transformed into a chic newly antiquated tea-shop. Got a last free table before queues started. Dinner 8.30 chez Jean-Claude and Annick. Other guest a young poet, Jacques Lèvre, whom Jean-Claude thinks ...”

“... Graham Robb, who is well known for his biographies of Balzac, Victor Hugo and Rimbaud, has written a history of what he calls a ‘vanished civilisation’, his theme being that in the 19th century, although homosexual love and homosexual fraternising were hardly admitted to exist, except perhaps in court reports, they were an omnipresent and vital part of the national life ...”

“... it with the misty, melancholy North and declared Romanticism to be primarily an effect of climate. Victor Hugo and his followers allied it to the vanished monarchy, then to the departed Napoleon, and finally to ‘liberalism in art’. Stendhal and Baudelaire produced more durable definitions by linking it to the present. For Stendhal, ‘Romanticism is ...”

“... in 1914), the great moments of unanimity have taken place at public funerals – like those of Victor Hugo, Pierre Overney, Jean-Paul Sartre, or Edith Piaf. Sunday’s demonstration is of the same order, the crowd is moved by sentiment and satisfied by coming together to express a vague desire for unity and reconciliation. As if the strength of the ...”