Search Results

Advanced Search

16 to 23 of 23 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

From Progress to Catastrophe

Perry Anderson: The Historical Novel, 28 July 2011

... something Scott was on the whole reluctant to do. In War and Peace we are closer to the spirit of Alexandre Dumas’s maxim: ‘On peut violer l’histoire à condition de lui faire de beaux enfants.’ The question, of course, is whether Tolstoy’s fictional portrait of Kutuzov qualifies as such a handsome offspring – that is, a persuasive work of ...

Summarising Oneself

Julian Barnes: Degas’s Vanity, 19 November 2020

The Letters of Edgar Degas 
edited by Theodore Reff.
Wildenstein Plattner Institute, 1464 pp., £150, June, 978 0 9988175 1 4
Show More
Show More
... deaf as well as blind. Zoë Closier read the newspaper to him over lunch; also the works of Alexandre Dumas, who had become his favourite writer. He likes Dumas because his novels are ‘patriotic’; as does his ‘patriotic’ friend Renoir. He fretted about the fate of his great collection, which surrounded ...

At Tate Britain

Peter Campbell: British Art and the French Romantics, 20 February 2003

... observation of weather in Paul Huet’s picture of a lonely rider, Storm at the End of the Day. Dumas’s novel mixes operatic themes with the odd sourly realistic vignette. The exhibition shows how two different visual cultures produced what lives side by side in the novel: scenes of romantic action and scenes of contemporary life. As the century ...

Writing and Publishing

Alan Sillitoe, 1 April 1982

... considered important concerned writers and artists. Under 4 July 1802 was recorded the birth of Alexandre Dumas. On one page was an account of his life, with a list of his best known works, while opposite was a section from The Count of Monte Cristo. By browsing through such a mishmash of fact, fiction and brief biographies I became familiar, after a ...

Book of Bad Ends

Paul Keegan: French Short Stories, 7 September 2023

The Penguin Book of French Short Stories: Vol I 
edited by Patrick McGuinness.
Penguin Classics, 483 pp., £30, October 2022, 978 0 241 46199 0
Show More
The Penguin Book of French Short Stories: Vol II 
edited by Patrick McGuinness.
Penguin Classics, 352 pp., £30, October 2022, 978 0 241 46205 8
Show More
Show More
... and its official history seems to need the reassurance of those novelists – Stendhal, Dumas, Balzac, Hugo, Zola – who tried their hand at storytelling.This anthology is the latest Penguin national showcase (volumes of Italian, Spanish and British stories have already appeared). It opens with a group of tales from the late 15th century, often ...

They didn’t mean me

Imaobong Umoren: African European History, 10 February 2022

African Europeans: An Untold History 
by Olivette Otele.
Hurst, 291 pp., £20, October 2020, 978 1 78738 191 9
Show More
Show More
... appointed him colonel of the Légion Saint-Georges, the first all-Black regiment in Europe (Alexandre Dumas’s father was one of his lieutenants). Although his compositions were banned under Napoleon, Afro-Caribbean communities in France and the Francophone Caribbean continued to spread his work and legacy. Figures such as de Saint-Georges and ...

Countess Bitch

Robert Tombs, 16 November 1995

The Notorious Life of Gyp: Right-Wing Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle France 
by Willa Silverman.
Oxford, 325 pp., £24, June 1995, 0 19 508754 2
Show More
Show More
... her house in semi-smart Neuilly, became acquainted with established literary stars such as Daudet, Dumas fils, Halévy and Goncourt and the promising novelists Anatole France and Maurice Barrès,who became one of her closest and most faithful friends. She held open house for her entourage during the summer in a villa on the Normandy coast. In short, she ...

Like a Carp on a Lawn

Graham Robb: Marie D’Agoult, 7 June 2001

The Life of Marie d'Agoult, Alias Daniel Stern 
by Phyllis Stock-Morton.
Johns Hopkins, 291 pp., £33, July 2000, 0 8018 6313 9
Show More
Marie d’Agoult: The Rebel Countess 
by Richard Bolster.
Yale, 288 pp., £16.95, September 2000, 0 300 08246 0
Show More
Show More
... sending up the chords to a gigantic bust of Beethoven which bisects the horizon like an Alp. Dumas père, Hugo, a trousered, cigarette-smoking Sand, a spindly Paganini and a tubby Rossini look on in admiration. Of the eight faces, only Marie d’Agoult’s is invisible. She is seen from behind, sitting on the floor, her head resting on the piano, in ...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences