Word: proust
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...anything short of the Bible itself. Flaubert, Baudelaire, Gautier all stood in his shadow, along with foreigners like Dostoyevsky and Conrad. In the words of English scholar Graham Robb, whose brilliant new biography, Victor Hugo (Norton; 682 pages; $39.95), does for this sublime windbag what George Painter did for Proust 30 years ago, Hugo was "a one-man education system through which every writer had to pass...The story of Hugo's influence after death is the story of a river after it reaches the sea. It was so pervasive that he was sometimes thought not to have...
...Miami Beach, where he spent, on and off, a number of months a year, as a frothy pink-drink antidote to his life in Italy, where he divided his time between his three-story 17th century palazzo in Milan and a 17-room villa on Lake Como. "For reading Proust I have my house on Lake Como," he said in 1993. "Here, in Miami Beach, I don't want another monastery to live in. I want a place to read Truman Capote...
Nancy noted Martha's magic for being discriminating but not snobbish. "She hated geraniums, which she called the rats of the garden, and she adored daffodils. She loved Wagner and Merle Haggard, Proust and Trollope and Dick Francis, but she described lunch with Erich Segal as like having "a hot fan blowing in my face." Her interest in the British royals was complex. She loved Princess Di for her instincts but described Charles as "having the survival smarts of a baby seal...
...House by indicating that he will name the President's close friend and adviser Bruce Lindsey, who was treasurer of Clinton's 1990 gubernatorial campaign, as an unindicted co-conspirator, a term popularized during Watergate. With that, Starr attached two scandals by prosaic association. Like the little cookie in Proust, the words bring on a flood of memories, in this case most of them foul...
Perhaps best articulated by Proust in his Remembrance of Things Past, this ethic dictates that the individual's imaginative re-appropriation of his own past is the best means of cultivating an educated perspective. A liberal education can scarcely aspire to do more. And those who seek to elevate the Western canon by denying racial and ethnic minorities a chance to create their own "usable pasts" do nothing but dishonor its normative implications...