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“... and then sink back down straight away.’ It is Kadare’s nicely humdrum version of the moment in Proust when Marcel stumbles on the uneven stones in the Guermantes’ courtyard, and memory opens itself up.If it didn’t trip you up, you wouldn’t remember anything. For the émigré writer, returning to live in ...”

“... the 1920s was physically strong and socially supple: he could charm the king of Spain, mesmerise Proust, shrug off Hemingway. He was news wherever he appeared and yet able to seal himself away in an expansive private freedom. One hand might distribute lordly largesse, the other remained clenched tight around those bundles of assets – ‘no different from ...”

“... Montaigne, Hobbes, Bayle, Voltaire, Sterne, Diderot, David, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Warburg, Proust, Kracauer, Picasso and many more, each an extraordinary display of learning. No other living historian approaches the range of this erudition. Every page of Threads and Traces, his latest work to appear in English, offers an illustration of ...”

“... liked things that were new, even if she often missed the point of them. She missed the point of Proust, for example: that Jewish writer who slept in a room lined with cork and wrote the famous book I could never read. You know, Marcel something . . . Nebbishy looking. He smelt of mothballs, wore a fur coat down to the ...”

“... had dismissed as ‘a denizen of the billiard hall’), he had proved a mine of information about Proust, who had hitherto just been a name to the Queen. To the foreign secretary he was not even that, and so she was able to fill him in a little. ‘Terrible life, poor man. A martyr to asthma, apparently, and really someone to whom one would have wanted to ...”

“... the action of The Leopard suggests the very late passages of A la recherche, in particular Marcel’s return to Paris, now strikingly decayed after World War One, although unlike Proust, Lampedusa provides no theory of redemptive art at the end. In his final illness and death the prince lies in a shabby Palermo ...”

“... with its own nimbus, the two adjacent from the days of Rousseau and Voltaire to those of Proust and Bergson. On lower levels were scattered the sciences humaines, history the most prominent, geography or ethnology not far away, economics further down. Under the Fifth Republic, this time-honoured hierarchy underwent significant changes. Sartre refused ...”

“... she divorced him in 1910.) She would ultimately roll over him by becoming, along with her friend Proust, simply the greatest of all 20th-century French novelists. ‘Those girls who dream … of being the erotic masterpiece of an older man,’ she would write coolly after deserting him: ‘It’s an ugly desire which they expiate by fulfilling.’ Then there ...”

“... would admit to such a shameful lack of ‘creativity’. But what is there to be ashamed of? Proust was surely speaking for many of his colleagues when he wrote that the desire to become a writer often comes long in advance of an ‘authentic’ subject:Since I wished, some day, to become a writer, it was time I knew what I was going to write. But as ...”