“Very searching, indeed excellent.”
— V. S. Pritchett, New York Review of Books
“Most intelligent and perceptive. . . . One of the principal merits of Brombert’s study is that it offers us in surprisingly brief space a view of Stendhal’s art as a whole and of the way in which all the individual works, fiction and nonfiction alike, form a coherent pattern.”
— Times Literary Supplement
“Brombert has written a book which is authoritative, incisive, imaginative . . . , a book that is at once profoundly scholarly, and refreshingly unpretentious. Brombert’s approach to Stendhal is eminently felicitous, for it combines the same qualities that distinguish the writer's own method: directness graced by lightness of touch, sympathy enlivened with wit, enthusiasm controlled by critical intelligence. . . . An exceptionally rich and stimulating book.”
— Gita May, Modern Language Quarterly
“Stimulating, speculative, and scholarly, this book is a model exercise in thematic criticism.”
— F. W. Saunders, French Studies
“[This work] will delight the knowledgeable reader. . . . Brombert is especially stimulating in his treatment of the role of Italy in Stendhal’s life and works.”
— Wallace Fowlie, Commonweal