Flaubert is a superb biography, not least because it gives us the portrait of a man embedded in his country and his age even as he rebels against its values and mores. Brown is masterly at drawing the background to his subject, social and political, writing with authority and an eye for the telling detail that compel fascination as well as respect. It is typical of him that he can chart Louis-Napoleon’s rise ‘from megalomaniac nuisance to prince- president’ with admirable succinctness, yet slip in that the aspirant emperor wore ‘tight shoes’ and that ‘his recommendation of a chiropodist named Eisenberg for the removal of painful corns appeared in a London Times advertisement’. Yet he never loses his way in the wealth of trivia at his command: whether leading us through the potentially bewildering changes of régime, evaluating the contemporary social standing of lawyers and doctors, sketching in the aesthetic and economic effects of Haussmann’s remodelling of Paris, or anatomising the theatre of the period, his touch is sure. It is against the solidity of this background that the paradoxes of Flaubert’s personality shimmer into life.

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