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“... Stendhal once observed that to introduce politics into a work of fiction was like firing a pistol during a performance in the theatre, a loud and unwanted intrusion of the real on a setting all calculated artifice. The analogy was brought to mind two weeks ago by the death of David Kelly, a real event which intruded in a shocking way on the calculated artificiality of the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee before which he’d been called, a body convened on the face of it to determine whether the Government had earlier misled all of us in persuading itself there needed to be a war; or whether, less seriously and once the war was over, a BBC journalist had misled rather fewer of us about the degree and nature of the Government’s duplicity ...”

“... on Brecht, said to be a practitioner not of subversion but of the shake-up, and a moving essay on Stendhal, which is Barthes’s last piece of writing – the second page of his clean copy was in his typewriter when he died. Stendhal cannot talk of what he loves, cannot evoke his beloved Italy. ‘...”

“... those who, like most French until recently, preferred to take their exoticism at a distance. For Stendhal, American life was a bore without even opera to relieve it, and all passions there came down to dollars in the end. For Baudelaire, long before Henry Miller’s air-conditioned nightmare, the United States were a gaslit wasteland. The universal ...”

“... to the vanished monarchy, then to the departed Napoleon, and finally to ‘liberalism in art’. Stendhal and Baudelaire produced more durable definitions by linking it to the present. For Stendhal, ‘Romanticism is the art of offering people the literary works which, in the present state of their habits and beliefs, are ...”

“... considerable space to Blum’s early literary productions, to his lifelong infatuation with Stendhal, and to his similarities with the half-Jewish Marcel Proust (who knew Blum and thought poorly of his writing). He carefully notes what Blum read in captivity during the war: Cicero, Shakespeare and Goethe, but also Rousseau, Musset, Mme de La Fayette, La ...”

“... Nothing as strong as Swift, but he is addicted to those exposers of knavery, La Rochefoucauld and Stendhal, and those exposers of foolishness, Jane Austen and Montaigne; all have major speaking parts in Elster’s play. In fact, his usual audience of economists, political scientists and psychologists are liable to take exception to his overt pleas for ...”

“... full of exceptions, 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 ...”

“... is Shelley’s verse-drama, The Cenci, written in 1819. Other writers drawn to the subject include Stendhal, Dickens, Artaud and Alberto Moravia. The appeal of the story is partly lurid – a pungent mix of Renaissance sex and violence; a sense of dark deeds behind the closed doors of a prominent Roman family. It affords a glimpse, in Shelley’s words, of ...”

“... no 19th-century novel by an English writer could claim the same sort of success as that enjoyed by Stendhal and Tolstoy. George Eliot, she finds, is disqualified by her morality. Doris Lessing is a pioneer of feminist self-consciousness in its raw state, and the very rhythm of her remorseless, circular and outstandingly honest narrative reflects the ...”

“... says Flaubert is ‘rightly’ regarded as the inventor of style indirect libre and realism. Stendhal and Balzac would be more conventional candidates for the honour, at least in the case of realism, but Stendhal is too quirky and Balzac, in Jameson’s view, is too dedicated to meaning and story. Too dedicated, that ...”

“... in a society tending always towards dull conformity would make her a worthy heroine in a Stendhal novel, which cannot be said for many English heroines’. Perhaps it cannot at the moment, but no doubt it will be soon: to see the novel in this way is to see all its heroes and heroines as largely interchangeable in terms of their critical potential ...”

“... must also change.’ In this sense, a lot of Postmodern art is as realist in its own way as Stendhal or Tolstoy. It is faithful to a world of surfaces, random sensations and schizoid human subjects. Postmodernism takes off when we come to realise that reality itself is now a kind of fiction, a matter of image, virtual wealth, fabricated ...”

“... one thing and a thing unchanged. He makes the implicit mistake of imagining that Flaubert and Stendhal and Turgenev and Dickens never wrote to a present. They exist for him as patterns of graven style; pieces of established art open only to the flexibilities of our belief in them. But novelists do write to a present, and though there may be nothing of ...”

“... achieve and maintain power. (Perhaps its only equal in this regard is The Charterhouse of Parma. Stendhal, of course, had a comic gift that the David author lacks, but, on the other hand, the biblical story produces tragic resonances that are beyond Stendhal.) Let me add that in regard to verbal craft, the David story is ...”

“... fictions embedded in the kind of wide historical novelscapes constructed by Walter Scott and Stendhal. Neither project was tremendously successful; there is nothing in the collection to disturb the conventional wisdom that Pushkin was a poet of genius who also wrote good prose. If Tales of Belkin gleam with possibility and the beginnings of something ...”