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“... science and formal decision theory. He quotes in an unforced and relevant way from Donne, Stendhal, Emily Dickinson and Groucho Marx, to name a few; about the last he remarks that his famous dictum, ‘I would not dream of belonging to a club which would have me as a member,’ is a reversal of the Master-Slave paradox, and that it was indeed he who ...”

“... the only moment he impinges on László Lázár’s life, is said to sound like a character from Stendhal, and he marks out the boundaries of the family home much like Hamlet stalking the ramparts, occasionally pausing, ‘like a man who has entirely forgotten what he came for’. Alice thinks of Orwell’s TB and wonders if she might float above the world ...”

“... in Goethe, of a potential, ‘manifest in each of its moments’. A favourite text of Canetti is Stendhal’s account of growing up in the French Revolution, La Vie de Henri Brulard. Dostoevsky, Büchner, Kafka also point the way to Auto da Fé. Writers who don’t, even great ones like Tolstoy, are of minor interest; Canetti’s essay on Tolstoy, one of his ...”

“... believes) it is necessarily true, but because it has had such a successful run of luck ever since Stendhal made it fashionable to think that while Raphael was all very well for the men of the Renaissance, the 19th century needed artists of its own. Stendhal’s answer was Horace Vernet, who, indeed, strides across European ...”

“... one does one’s reverence, as one goes, to Verlaine, to Sainte-Beuve, to Baudelaire, Flaubert, Stendhal, Georges Sand, all sitting there on pedestals as if the purpose of literature were to look down upon the world. My favourite statuary in the Luxembourg is dedicated to Frédéric Chopin. Whoever designed it was a miracle of discretion, because the artist ...”

“... psychological deconstructions, recalling those of the novels (and incidentally his admiration for Stendhal). There’s urbanity in the novels, but not unchecked by irony. Here, in the convention of memoirs, it’s more genial and extensive, admitting a lot of gossip-column trivia where I’ve looked for the joke only to discover that there isn’t one. Sheer ...”

“... and even pointless. True, Italy had art – but what was the use of that? We have heard of the ‘Stendhal syndrome’, in which the patient finds himself, as Stendhal did in Florence, dazed and feverish upon the ingestion of so much rich art. Thomson suffered from whatever is the opposite of this condition: The Enthusiasm ...”

“... reprinted, Will confides that it is far better than most first novels and that it reminds him of Stendhal. ‘No, no!’ S. protests. Women, infectiously high-spirited at times, is not so much a machine to think with as a machine for ego-massage. When reviewer’s droop and readerly impatience are starting to set in, Will (or his creator) is prepared with a ...”

“... of those who have written about battle since the pioneers of its descriptive technique, Stendhal and Tolstoy. And yet ordinary soldiers in battle do in fact have an involuntary eye for just such detail. I remember noting with interest that there was a great deal of what seemed to be ordinary household dust on a mortar barrel which was just about to ...”

“... the narrator of A Friend from England, is part-owner of a Notting Hill bookshop and a reader of Stendhal; her first novel A Start in Life (1981) took its title from Balzac and had a heroine whose life was ‘ruined by literature’. Nor is Rachel unusual in feeling a strong attraction towards people for whom comfort is more important than culture. In her ...”

“... Gagarin is a frequent visitor at parties at the Villa Medici, along with Berlioz, Mendelssohn and Stendhal, the French consul at nearby Civitavecchia. French seems to have been Gagarin’s natural language, and Vernet’s group of radical young bohemians his natural social circle. Julia Taaffe’s prim little group from Co. Louth, always escorted and ...”

“... other respects these poems seem to remember not much before Whitman, and certainly nothing before Stendhal or Keats. Clearly, if Gunn has indeed been one modern poet with a sympathy for the English Renaissance, that was far from being as central to his achievement as some of us thought. For the achievement is still there: The Passages of Joy is as fine a ...”

“... poetry seek the virtues of French prose. Poetry should be at least as well written as the prose of Stendhal and Flaubert or the verse of Gautier, Corbière, Rimbaud and Laforgue. In The ABC of Reading he praised Crabbe, Landor, quoting a passage from Landor’s Alcaeus: Wormwood and rue be on his tongue And ashes on his head, Who chills the feast and checks ...”

“... The letters are haunted by Napoleon and Byron to much the same degree as are the writings of Stendhal and Pushkin, and Byron’s account of English high society in the last five cantos of Don Juan frequently comes to mind when reading Pückler’s account of its more rigid or frigid lords and ladies, and the relaxed culture of the country house. But in ...”

“... And yet Waterloo never assumed epic proportions in the British imagination. While Balzac, Hugo, Stendhal and Tolstoy grappled with the meaning of Napoleon, Thackeray gave the world Vanity Fair, Wellington released his table-talk, and Thomas Cook gathered another party of tourists for a trip across the Channel. For some reason, Anglophone culture has often ...”