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“... to their stock of ideas: Goethe, Heine, Herder, Novalis, Jean Paul, Madame de Staël, Stendhal, George Sand. Many English writers, resisting the fanaticism with which phrenology was being promoted (George Combe’s The Constitution of Man, the central manifesto of the cult, sold 50,000 copies between 1835 and 1838 ...”

“... to them or that they had already complied with it when they ceded a few thousand square miles of sand to Egypt in the Camp David Accords. Still, the West Bank and Gaza Strip today contain more than a million and a half Palestinians who, under international law and the rules of the United Nations, are clearly entitled to create their own national state, just ...”

“... Oscar Wilde (with his quasi-Renaissance velvet suits), as well as the female cross-dresser (from George Sand to Marlene Dietrich). We learn of ‘The Anti-Neutral Suit’ in the Futurist Manifesto, which promised ‘three-dimensional colour acrobatics’, and the TuTa of 1919, an avant-garde adaptation of the utilitarian boiler suit that supposedly ...”

“... cinematic speed.‘We Russians have two countries,’ Dostoevsky wrote in an essay on the death of George Sand: ‘Our Russia and Europe, even when we call ourselves Slavophiles.’ Nabokov thought a sentimental and reactionary vision of Russia won out too often in Dostoevsky’s work, or perhaps he meant to suggest only that too many readers celebrated ...”

“... location for the encounter of two eminent Victorians: and they might equally have met in George Eliot’s drawing-room. Whereas Stephen was much the more distinguished mountaineer, Harrison probably knew George Eliot better: he helped her work out the legal plot of Felix Holt, a service for which she may have owed ...”

“... of letters, having paid close attention to the published correspondence of Balzac, Flaubert and George Sand, and alert to the power of editors. After reading Sidney Colvin’s edition of the letters of his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, he wrote: ‘One has the vague sense of omissions and truncations – one smells the thing unprinted.’ In the years ...”

“... in Clough’s fellow’s rooms in Oriel, brewed from copious draughts of Carlyle, Emerson, George Sand and Goethe, they were unable to shake off their religious concern. In Clough’s case, the sheer self-destructiveness of the sceptical process and the guilt which haunted him over his sexual impulses revived his religious questionings. In the ...”

“... the sole representative of our literature.’ Contemporary admirers included Balzac, Goethe and George Sand. But Cooper also had the misfortune to inspire one of the funniest hatchet-jobs ever written, Mark Twain’s ‘Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences’ (1895), which detects 114 out of a possible 115 offences committed in two-thirds of a page of ...”

“... and least reliable fictional characters: Merton Densher in The Wings of the Dove (1902) and George Darrow in The Reef (1912). Like other biographies tracking the ‘invisible lives’ of writers’ lovers – Claire Tomalin’s Life of Dickens’s Ellen Ternan, or the now-forgotten but interesting Portrait of Zélide (Benjamin Constant’s mistress, Mme ...”

“... of cross-dressing is phrased in terms of women’s selective borrowing from men – Joan of Arc, George Sand, Marlene Dietrich, the famous Helmut Newton photograph of a model in a Saint Laurent suit, whose flared trousers conceal shoes with very high heels, accompanied by another woman, stark naked except for the same shoes and a Paulette hat. The only ...”

“... a remarkable Jamesian epigraph about ‘the reporter and the reported’ from his 1896 essay on George Sand, in which he looks to a future when ‘the cunning of the inquirer’, exceeding ‘in subtlety and ferocity anything we today conceive’, will be met by ‘the pale forewarned victim, with every track covered, every paper burnt, and every ...”

“... laugh at him. Then he left her. ‘Women are monsters who are authors,’ Renoir wrote, attacking George Sand. Still in the 1920s, in the interwar bohemia of the New Woman, Floyd Dell, a Freudian and habitué of Greenwich Village, was repelled by the ‘girl artist’: ‘I wanted to be married to a girl who would not put her career before children ...”

“... dance in a lifetime of silly dances. She claimed that she had once been an intimate friend of George Sand, but there is no reason to believe her. As Morton puts it, Lola was ‘a predator but sadly one who rampaged almost for the sake of it’. At the end of his book, Morton compares her to Becky Sharp, and suggests that Thackeray may have had her in ...”

“... seemed improbable for a future novelist. Persistent rumours that she was not the daughter of George Frederic Jones but the illegitimate offspring of a Scottish peer or an English tutor clearly attest to a sense that there was something otherwise inexplicable about this ambitious daughter of Old New York. Her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934), says ...”

“... soul. Years later Balzac would produce a telling portrait of the self-torturing romantic loves of George Sand, Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult in the (relatively little-read) novel, Béatrix. It’s hard to know who could have done justice to the upper-class intellectual-bohemian melodrama played out in and around Coppet – perhaps Goethe’s troubling ...”