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“... The wife a delicate, suffering lady who plays the harp? Please. Marie Williams at the harp. Jean-Yves Tadié is enchanted by these artistic possibilities. In the letters, he says, Mme Marie Williams ‘appears to us as if she were a heroine in a novel by Maupassant, Notre coeur for example’. She appears to us even more clearly as if she were a ...”

“... in 1965, George Painter referred to ‘fragments of a lost novel’. In his 1996 biography Jean-Yves Tadié spoke of ‘75 pages currently missing’. The manuscripts were not in the collection of papers that went to the Bibliothèque nationale in 1962, or indeed anywhere else that scholars could think of. For Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, the skilful ...”

“... Nathalie Sarraute had her own, esoteric way of doing well at school. When, at her Paris lycée, her class was asked whether anyone had read War and Peace, the 13-year-old Nathalie (née Natalya Tcherniak, in Russia), did not want to say that she had. She was fearful: not of advertising how grown-up her reading had already become but of what she might have to listen to should her teacher ‘dare to touch’ the book and the ineffable Tolstoy be invested by the crass discourse of a pedagogue ...”

“... The notebooks are not a place of confessions but of sketches of scenes for the work to come.’ Jean-Yves Tadié doesn’t mention the scene at all. But then there is a sense in which these letters begin to look more like symptoms than a means of communication, or like a language in which an otherwise unspoken communication can take place. The mother ...”

“... Jewish, they did not write as Jews. ‘It was in spite of his origins,’ Proust’s biographer Jean-Yves Tadié writes, ‘that a Jewish intellectual took the side of Dreyfus.’ The fight for justice, the critique of ethnic hatred, the case for Dreyfus, were all mounted in the name of universal humanitarian values in which we can already see the ...”

“... opposed triumphalist bids to proclaim the hegemony of French letters after it. His outlook was, as Jean-Yves Tadié accurately describes it, a liberal conservatism of a largely unpolitical stamp. ‘La politique au fond m’est égale.’ Powell’s conservatism was much more political, and more radical. It took some time to crystallise, early attitudes ...”

“... hundred fewer from Reiner Stach. Proust, expiring at 51, got just under a thousand apiece from Jean-Yves Tadié and William Carter; Joyce, at 59, eight hundred from Richard Ellmann. Moving down the scale to medium or lightweights, there is little reduction in size. If we confine ourselves to Britain, Martin Stannard produced a thousand pages on Evelyn ...”