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“... of a complete picture of France in his time. As if wanting some credit, he remarked that it ‘was no small task to depict the two or three thousand conspicuous types of a period’. (This wasn’t hyperbole, since there are more than two thousand named characters in the Comédie humaine.) Balzac’s significance in the history of the novel was fully apparent ...”

“... I think you might be right? That was the best time of our lives!’ said Deslauriers.There is no doubt of the success of the effect, this slapstick without ridicule, but how has Flaubert managed, throughout the book, to keep us from laughing? Of course, there are plenty of places where laughter is actually invited. But many key moments have this strange ...”

“... Alone in Rome, he studies the city’s art and architecture and reads the classics. There is no question of boredom now: ‘I delighted in my isolation,’ Alphonse tells us, conveying a powerful sense of youthful potential on the lookout for some task or adventure that will engage his idealism. Moving south to Naples, he meets up with Aymon de ...”

“... whom he admired all the more ardently once he was imprisoned. Free to plagiarise: Stendhal had no qualms about stealing whatever was useful to build a book. Free to lie, when it was convenient or made a good story. Free to be candid: few writers have been franker about their friends’ shortcomings, or their own transgressions. ‘I don’t think he was ...”

“... but in his youth had few other aesthetic pleasures, confessing to his sister: ‘Pictures give me no pleasure, architecture a little but practically none. Sculpture absolutely none, moreover music, poetry and singing give me no pleasure. It is a sad fact.’ He was never sent to school and could not spell. It is all too ...”

“... which her flirtation with the other young men of his coterie had frequently plunged him. Jeanne MacKenzie suggests that he and his friends – known to the press as the Corrupt Coterie – shared the romantic fatalism of their class and were half in love with death, and for once the cliché earns its keep. ‘Corrupt’ in the modern sense they certainly ...”

“... and the decolonising battle to remake Algeria after 1962 into an entirely Arab country with no links to its French past, the two histories are inseparable; one could not be written without taking the other into account. It would be wrong to maintain that only an African could write the history of Africa, or only a Muslim the history of Islam, or a woman ...”

“... exam in the morning. She said she would just head back to the tower by herself but her father said no, it was fine, they’d finish up and drive back together. She could study her notes and the adults could continue their conversation over tea. It was always a pleasure, on a nice evening, to entertain in the sitting room with the twinkling lights ...”