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“... Alexandre Dumas was a force of nature. The 650 or so books he published might not seem an extraordinary tally for such as Barbara Cartland, who could dictate six thousand words between lunch and tea, or Georges Simenon, who rarely spent more than a fortnight on a novel. But Dumas was not merely a novelist: he also wrote plays, travel books, memoirs, histories, accounts of great crimes plus a mass of ‘occasional’ writings which include his vast Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine ...”

“... scooping with baskets. Admittedly, that was no longer true in the 19th century, but, according to Alexandre Dumas in 1873, ‘calculations’ proved that ‘if no accident prevented the hatching of the eggs, and if each cod grew to its full size, it would take only three years for the sea to be full of cod, so that one could walk dry-shod across the ...”

“... teacher...[who] tells himself “I should not wish to have written novels like those of Balzac and Alexandre Dumas,” for that alone is more intelligent than Alexandre Dumas and Balzac’; or ‘the masterpieces of the French language are school prize-giving speeches and academic writings’; or ‘judgment is ...”

“... When the poet Lamartine introduced imaginary dialogue into his History of the Girondins (1844-7), Alexandre Dumas applauded, saying: ‘He has raised history to the level of the novel.’ However, both literary critics and professional historians condemned him: why, they asked, did he not stick to what he was good at? He resented being for ever labelled ...”

“... unnoticed.’ The daughter of Henri II and Catherine, Marguerite de Valois, known to readers of Alexandre Dumas as Queen Margot, passed unnoticed for an even more dramatic reason: she was exiled from the court for 19 years. It was not her husband, Henri IV, but his immediate predecessor, Marguerite’s brother Henri III, who originally banished ...”

“... property itself were still in a fluid state. This is the age whose most popular writer – Alexandre Dumas – ran a novel ‘factory’ and sauntered through the garden of world literature, secateurs in hand. The play which is usually described as the first blow struck for Romantic drama in France – Dumas’s ...”

“... aria is followed by a few notes, like those of a discursive essayist, about Sherlock Holmes and Alexandre Dumas. Next day a friend advises Lenin to avoid the lake: ‘Peasants have told me that it is famous as the haunt of a giant water-worm that has been known to drag down dogs, even deer.’ Lenin laughs at this ‘hayseed yarn’, although he knows ...”

“... days were Hugo (‘His Notre Dame is an all-time favourite with romantic rollers’), Eugène Sue, Alexandre Dumas (hence Montecristo), Galdos and Zola. Hugo, the greatest European influence in Latin America in the 19th century, wrote when he heard of the practice ‘a letter of thanksgiving to Partagas’: ‘This was read aloud to the torcedores ...”

“... became renowned for its scepticism towards féministes – initially a pejorative term, coined by Alexandre Dumas fils in his lampoon L’Homme-femme (1872) – and the timidity of its movement for women’s civil rights. In England, the doctrine of coverture, which subsumed a married woman’s legal existence under her husband’s, was dismantled in the ...”

“... at an exhibition hands you back your umbrella in return for a check,’ says James. When Alexandre Dumas asked her in her old age what she thought of Lélia, she said she could not even manage to read through the first volume. ‘All the same, when I wrote that book, I was sincere.’ Her letters, as she ages, express more and more ...”

“... water. His Notre-Dame de Lourdes sold over a million copies: more than Victor Hugo, Jules Verne or Alexandre Dumas; more probably than any other book published in France in the 19th century. It ran to 142 editions in just seven years; was translated into 80 languages and remained in print until the Sixties. It did so well because it was highly ...”

“... to pay for your treasured work. The most valuable painter of Van Gogh’s day was Meissonier, that Alexandre Dumas of 19th-century painting, whose fame, subject matter (typically, Napoleon’s triumphs and disasters) and traditional technique we might plausibly expect to have repelled the younger painter. Van Gogh disdained what he called ‘studio ...”

“... for some of the suspense found in the works of Balzac, Victor Hugo, Tolstoi, Dostoevski, Flaubert, Alexandre Dumas and Strindberg. Yiddish and Hebrew literature both suffered from a lack of suspense. Everything in them centred around some yeshivah student who had gone astray, sought worldly knowledge, then suffered the consequences at the yeshivah or at ...”

“... a crazy person’, as Butler has it, than ‘like a dumb animal’. (Butler earlier quotes Alexandre Dumas on the ‘trainloads of young people’ arriving from the provinces: ‘especially girls from the lowest classes who, being so close to natural savagery, retain their animal appetites for sensual indulgence’.) By the time Rodin was ...”

“... died in poverty in Paris, but his exploits continued to be mythologised into the 19th century, by Alexandre Dumas in his novel Le Capitaine Paul, for example, and by Herman Melville, who wrote in Israel Potter about Jones’s capture of the British sloop-of-war HMS Drake:It was … such a scheme as only could have inspired a heart which held at nothing ...”