Victor Hugo. Graham Robb. 1997.

Victor Hugo was a colossus who strode across French literature bridging the divide between the antique classicism of post-revolution France and the Modernist stirrings of late Romanticism. His influence as a poet, playwright and novelist, extended further than that of any other writer. But he was also a politician and a painter, a lover and a revolutionary who came to symbolise France in the second half of the nineteenth century in all its turmoil and complexity. Exiled by Napoleon III in 1851, Hugo lived in the Channel Islands until the 1870s and there discovered a new set of identities : among them the visionary poet who invented a religion and who received compliments on his work from Jesus Christ and Shakespeare.