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“... The size and variety of Victor Hugo’s oeuvre – around 200,000 lines of verse, plus dozens of novels, plays and critical works – makes it difficult to get an overview, let alone make a selection. In his Hugoliade, Ionesco suggested that Hugo’s best chance of survival lay in the impossibility of reading everything he’d written ...”

“... Paris, writing to his sister in Rouen to tell her of the evening he had spent with, among others, Victor Hugo: I took pleasure in studying him closely; I gazed at him with astonishment, like a casket in which there were millions and a king’s diamonds, reflecting on all that had come from this man now sitting beside me on a small chair, and fixing my ...”

“... Any reflection​ on Victor Hugo risks degenerating into a procession of superlatives. Poet, dramatist, novelist, romantic, reactionary, revolutionary, mystic, miser and indefatigable philanderer: without him French literature, French politics of the 19th century are unimaginable. The scope of his ambition, the range of his genius, the vastness of his output, the extent of his appetite, the audacity of his opportunism and the oceanic immensity of his self-regard prompt awe – as well as sentences like these, cumulative and insistent, as his own so often were ...”

“... see them raze the ruins and build a ‘city of towers’ on modernistic lines. In a similar way, Victor Hugo remarked of the post-Napoleonic Bourbons that ‘nothing is more decrepit than at the moment of its restoration.’ The editors of this volume might agree with such sentiments. Their book contains knowledgeable and entertaining ...”

“... It was Victor Hugo who first brought the water evacuation system of Notre-Dame cathedral to the world’s attention. The central character of Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) was like a living gargoyle, a tortured ‘bundle of disordered limbs’ swinging furiously on bell-ropes, scrambling over the face of Notre-Dame, dislodging the crows, as he leaped ‘from projection to projection ...”

“... after Victor Hugo Two bullets to the head, the child had taken. It was a clean, honest, humble, quiet place. In blessing, above a portrait, hung a palm cross. His aged granny stood there, trembling, lost. In silence, we removed his clothes. His mouth hung open, pale, the eye-life drowned in death. Each arm fell useless from its socket ...”

“... mouth and the eyes, which Nadar called ‘two drops of coffee’, betraying some vulnerability. Victor Hugo, side-on, avuncular, or on his deathbed; a glacial Eugène Delacroix; the incredibly joyless Goncourt brothers; a series of portraits of George Sand, who went to Nadar in desperation after a competitor had captured with great vividness her ...”

“... or it makes you think you are infallible, or your writing becomes puffed out with self-esteem. (Victor Hugo thought himself superior to both Jesus and Shakespeare.) It is a complication that the imagination can well do without.’ It is the spring of 1993. Gunn is on the list of those who will read at a literary festival in a huge old market building ...”

“... idea: to follow nine contemporary intellectuals – d’Agoult, the novelists George Sand, Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert, the statesman Lamartine, the liberal theorist and parliamentarian Alexis de Tocqueville and the socialists Karl Marx, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Alexander Herzen – into the revolution, link arms with them as they pass ...”

“... discourse, haunted by the fundamental unnarratability and incomprehensibility of history’; Victor Hugo is teased and disparaged for his melodramatic portraits of ‘Napoléon le Petit’ and his ‘thundering certainties’, though the effect of Hugo’s mad caricatures can scarcely be described as ...”

“... was an actor playing Malraux.’ A conscious echo, no doubt, of Jean Cocteau’s remark that ‘Victor Hugo was a mad-man who thought he was Victor Hugo.’ But Lottman’s – and others’ – objection to Malraux was less that he was mad than that he was misleading. ‘For all of his life André Malraux let ...”

“... intellectual frontiers.Robb is the author of well-received, scholarly biographies of Balzac and Victor Hugo, published with the usual apparatus of notes and bibliographies. His more recent book, The Ancient Paths: Discovering the Lost Map of Celtic Europe (2013), dispensed with the conventions of academic history: in it he claimed to have discovered a ...”

“... while omitting to mention that this was so largely from the point of view of the ruling classes: Victor Hugo, in his ‘Guerre aux démolisseurs’, attacked the obsession with the straight line by linking it directly to the oppressive exercise of state authority). The Emperor’s main objectives, however, were strictly practical: to make the city ...”

“... say that all Salon pictures were still lifes, even a picture of a heroic battle or a portrait of Victor Hugo – perhaps especially a portrait of Victor Hugo, whose marmoreal fame had turned him into a still life already.This is not, of course, as simple or monumental a story as the professional insiders v. the ...”

“... called Aperiatur Terra et Germinet Salvatorem, Rorate Caeli et Nubes Pluant Iustum and Olympe-Für Victor Hugo. That is the White Cube part of the exhibition. Up Duke Street and across Piccadilly, in the forecourt of the Royal Academy, Kiefer (who is an honorary RA) has erected two towers, one of five storeys, the other of six. The work, called ...”