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“... Corbusier, Haussmann (the ‘Alsatian Attila’), Malraux, Mary Wollstonecraft, poets (especially Baudelaire, though he appreciated Pope for his malice), Saint Just, the staff of the Archives Nationales – and might suggest an habitual intolerance. But he is really only intolerant of other people’s intolerance, of those impatient to inflict their own ...”

“... of individual poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukeyser and Charles Tomlinson. In the notes Weinberger has glossed allusions, and brought together, as my quotations have suggested, an illuminating set of comments by Paz himself. Paz’s recurring references are to Baudelaire and ...”

“... angles it still yields riches. What fabulous chimeras they chased after, back then. In the wake of Baudelaire dreaming up his ‘correspondences’ of colour and sound, artists began to cherish the notion that every kind of sensory input might converge, so as to pitch participants onto some indefinable plane of transformed consciousness. Synaesthesia became a ...”

“... begins to ease up and move with him, in the manner of the city that Benjamin envisaged for Baudelaire. Rimbaud was not a flâneur. There’s too much of the forced march, and the habits of the robust boy from the sticks, in the way he gets from A to B. But in the Illuminations, the effects of parallax and the sense of landscape as a series of ...”

“... the acceptance of a scarcely very edifying abjectness which made him say that he ‘wanted to be Baudelaire and Rimbaud without the poverty and suffering’, or lament the truth of his one-time employer Logan Pearsall Smith’s dictum that ‘one can’t be fashionable and first-rate.’ Shelden does not make use of Powell’s account, nor does he quote the ...”

“... had a bad fit of the spleen.’ Spleen is the key to the temperament Gilmour conveys. Like Baudelaire, Lampedusa was prey to both spleen and l’Idéal: when he was touched by beauty, he wanted to push away the pleasure of it – a surrender would acknowledge its power and entail a diminution of mastery. Describing ‘the sorcery of illumination and ...”

“... not its leaders and lawgivers, who most deplored the paradoxical openness of its society. Baudelaire and Flaubert, who viewed the bourgeois with a hatred and disgust almost pathological in its intensity, hated in particular its most tender emotions. They were a sham, a pretence, a revolting hypocrisy. But in retrospect it can be made to appear that it ...”

“... in which Charlemagne fell’; and [Fowler] wonders whether Milton may be contrasting the greater Charles with his own later monarch, who went to Fuenterrabia in 1659 to engage in some ignoble diplomacy. This speculation ... provides a genuinely fascinating context for Fontarabbia; but it is a context which (like all scholarly contexts) defines the field of ...”

“... civilisations. But they belong to an honoured French literary tradition which includes Diderot, Baudelaire and the Goncourt brothers; and, like Malraux’s voluble conversation, they include remarkable insights. As Pierre Rosenberg, a curator at the Louvre, put it: ‘Suddenly in this torrent of words you find a sort of diamond.’ The final reproach ...”

“... came up to tell me it was closing immediately. The next day a makeshift fence surrounded it. ‘Baudelaire loved solitude,’ Walter Benjamin wrote, ‘but he wanted it in a crowd.’ Today any area that might attract a crowd has shut down and Governor Cuomo frowns on walks. You can still find ‘crowds’, but they’re made up of people you already know ...”

“... slight lyric grace’. He could now be mentioned in the same sentence as Catullus and Laforgue, Baudelaire and Gautier. He could be declared ‘a classic’, by a critic who was to spend a good deal of time deciding exactly what that meant. Margoliouth’s edition, The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, in two volumes, was in the same Oxford series as ...”

“... notions of her, I find, are at once detailed, puerile and unbending – a strange hodge-podge of Baudelaire, Mary Barnard and Ronald Firbank, all coloured still by the prejudicial fancies of a flannel-shirted, late Seventies lesbian adolescence: SAPPHO: short, dark in appearance, teensiest hint of a moustache – a cross between Mme Moller (high school ...”

“... surprising in view of the long-held belief that illness can heighten the creative imagination, as Baudelaire noted of the intensity of sound and colour experienced during convalescence. It is not just approaching health, however, but approaching death which clears the sight. ‘I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my ...”

“... devices for the vertical transport of goods, primarily, but also of people. The English diplomat Charles Greville, writing in 1830, recalled with admiration a lift in the Genoese palace of the Sardinian royal couple: ‘For the comfort of their bodies he has a machine made like a car, which is drawn up by a chain from the bottom to the top of the house; it ...”

“... dog sculpture, and Walpole regarded her work as equal to Bernini’s; she also presented busts of Charles James Fox and Nelson to Napoleon – Fox, because of her connection with the Whig opposition and Nelson, presumably, as an object of disinterested admiration now that he was safely dead. Her novelty value as a woman sculptor seems to have secured her ...”