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“... left his fingertips painful to the touch, and he wore a scarf all summer. ‘It was like visiting Marcel Proust in his bedroom,’ a friend recalled.Philosophy became his refuge, from the moment he read Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. But he soon abandoned Sartre – and indeed anything influenced by Hegel and dialectics – in favour of vitalist ...”

“... riche, déclassé, dépassé, or simply, with a look down the nose, nouveau). My father loved Proust, but chiefly as a guide to social niceties and the rich comic contretemps they brought about – in the book and in the world.Yet, at the same time, the structure built by the vocabulary was subject to a subtle distancing, as if the pageant were always a ...”

“... except, that is, if they have to be written to, when Flaubert can be as glibly sycophantic as Marcel Proust, false praise being for him a coded way of showing contempt. But if he slates the work – of the great historian Jules Michelet, for example, or of Victor Hugo, whose Les Misérables he sees as directed at ‘all that philosophico-evangelical ...”

“... who clumsily pretend in broken English to be their wives’. This ‘bon ville’ was Cabourg, Proust’s Balbec. Channon dined with Princesse Soutzo: ‘I was between Marcel Proust and Jean Cocteau … Proust has always been kind to me and I don’t like to libel him in the pages ...”

“... Profonde Albertine’, the narrator writes close to the end of Proust’s novel. By ‘deep’ – profonde – he means ‘unreachable’. She was mostly that when she was alive, and has assumed this quality as a permanent attribute now that she is dead. But he can still be tortured by his memories of all he didn’t know, for a while at least: ‘For, after death, Time leaves the body, and the memories … are effaced from her who no longer exists and soon will be from him whom at present they still torture ...”

“... focus on is how far such art approximates to the antique and heralds the Renaissance. All that Marcel Thomas can say about the painting of the Garden of Eden, for example, is that Adam in the second episode is clearly modelled on a Roman statue of a wounded Persian. But an unbiased look at the pages reproduced in this volume surely reveals that the whole ...”

“... dexterity when it came to smashing up a hotel room. Another rival would be Ernest A. Forssgren, Proust’s Swedish valet, a dapper but conceited fellow who introduced to the world the notion that Marcel was not quite as gay as all that. Proust, incidentally, was a glutton for ...”

“... to be Jewish,’ she explains: ‘All the best writers are Jewish … or homosexual./Or both! Marcel Proust is extraordinary.’ ‘David’ is puzzled by his mother’s confidences: ‘Is she trying to tell us that she’d have liked to be a great writer?’ David, of course, would like to be a great writer; and, having adopted a Jewish identity, he ...”

“... which they simply put it all down, with various degrees of relaxation and garrulity. A memoir by Proust, instead of a novel by Marcel, is a depressing thought. Such reflections are prompted by Mary McCarthy’s latest book. There was something challenging and stimulating, a bracing offer of American romance, about A ...”

“... Kafka’s letters to Felice Bauer, Flaubert’s to Louise Colet, Baudelaire’s to his mother, Proust’s to his many worldly correspondents. Artaud’s to his editor, Rilke’s to his several female guardian angels, and Mallarmé’s to his circle of literary acquaintances. In each case, the correspondence exists not to achieve closeness but to hold ...”

“... snobbery is like his enthusiasm for churches – an emotional and aesthetic passion. As Proust says, snobs are often poets, in whose breasts a whole springtide of social flowers are bursting. He should know – he was one himself. But if one defines a snob as one who takes what seems to others an excessive interest in class – the unmentionable ...”

“... elegant young man, with the cult poet Anna de Noailles on his arm, thanks to an introduction from Proust, he danced the polka at the Bastille Day ball in 1912, careful, first, to alert the photographers. ‘If I were to take a picture of a village wedding,’ a photographer once remarked, ‘Jean Cocteau would appear between the bride and groom.’ Across the ...”

“... Marcel Aymé’s novel Le Passemuraille, about a man who can walk through walls, would have interested Thomas Caulfield Irwin (1823-92). Irwin is cited in Paul Muldoon’s To Ireland, I for a neighbourly dispute he was having with one John O’Donovan. ‘He says I am his enemy,’ Irwin wrote, ‘and watch him through the thickness of the wall which divides our houses ...”

“... on some sort of thesis, her ideal mode of transport I suppose a cork-lined carriage. The ‘Marcel Proust’ might be a good name for a train. 16 May. Philip Roth’s face in a photograph by Nancy Crampton on the jacket of his new novel, Everyman, is as stern and ungiving as a self-portrait by Rembrandt. 30 May, Yorkshire. Not one in fifty people ...”

“... was anybody. All – the cream – of Paris.’ In the crowd, among many others, was the young Marcel Proust, who would take from this unedifying spectacle of indecorous bodies clambering all over each other as they jockeyed for position, some of the more sadistic components of his portrayal of the French high-society drawing-room. Society ladies, but ...”