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“... Seventeen years earlier, in a letter to Henri Fantin-Latour, Whistler had compared the painter’s exertions to ‘the pain of giving birth’. The Chelsea Girl (1884) was no great labour, however. It was the ‘sketch of one afternoon’, Whistler told the organisers of a Chicago exhibition in 1893, ‘the first statement or the beginning of a ...”

“... in this extremity, on what life rather than art can do. In its loving detail and its quiet humour Painter’s today quite undated biography matches and complements Proust’s own method, and his own dedication. He is especially good at bringing out the ways in which real life could not be used by Proust, supreme as were his digestive powers where the ...”

“... as in her in-laws’ house in Illiers, where a crucifix hung over her bed? In the 1950s, George Painter failed to interview the many witnesses still around, preferring instead to piece together a version of Proust’s life from his fiction, which he then used to explain the novel. Bloch-Dano does not go this far, but she sometimes tends in the ...”

“... two ‘Iberian beings’ eating one another with the help of spoon and fork and, according to the painter, expressing the pathos of civil war. Almost every item James collected would have made an appropriate exhibit in what Dali called Surrealism’s ‘lawsuit against Reality’, but I particularly admired two very small paintings – certainly no bigger ...”

“... of them. What had happened? In the second volume of his biography of Proust, published 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 ...”

“... during my visit was Boats and a Riverside Mansion, traditionally attributed to the ninth-century painter Li Sixun. The silk has darkened and the colours faded, but you can still see the extreme refinement of the tiny brushstrokes, the infinite pains taken to define figures and foliage.The landscapes painted by Northern Song artists from the tenth century ...”

“... as the ‘convincing and accessible near-novels by biographers like André Maurois and George Painter’ suggest, and it reaches out to a universe far more varied than ‘the thin thread of Proust’s biography’. These are fighting words in our biographical days, but the reminder is more than timely. What we miss if we collapse Balbec into ...”

“... and sprightly picture book (which, incidentally, largely reflected Sonia’s view of the true George, though no reviewers noticed this). Perhaps so. I’m only irritated that Koestler failed to notice why I was so explicitly sceptical of the concept of character. Let me try again. I have talked to Koestler once at length and twice briefly and have read ...”

“... Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, worked, we are told, as a bookseller, florist and decorative painter before becoming a journalist and writing for Harpers & Queen and the Evening Standard diary. In 1979 and 1983 she stood as a Parliamentary candidate for the Wessex Regional Party. She met Ossie Clark in 1982 after he was acrimoniously divorced from the ...”

“... union, but even (or especially) on this reading Edmund White finds the image ‘chilling’, and George Painter has this to say: If [Mme Proust’s] words were given their full, terrible meaning they would imply a mystic union with her son more valid than her marriage, in an alien faith, to his father. But their consequences need not be taken so ...”

“... written records and the reserve collections of galleries for every mention and trace of a woman painter. Her findings are numerous but seldom lively, and she has relentlessly put them all in. Her text is weighted down, sometimes twice to a page, with mere lists, which, since there are notes at the back, could with more kindness to the reader have gone ...”

“... At his school, by one of those common but always surprising coincidences, was another famous painter-to-be, Philip Guston. It was a reactionary time and place, with red-baiting, strike-breaking and an active Klan. Both Guston and Pollock ran foul of the authorities. Pollock had already started to drink seriously. He dropped in and out of school. He was ...”

“... the way myself. The journey had an unexpected purpose. Some years earlier a professional portrait painter, June Mendoza, had asked me to sit for my portrait. After it was finished she offered it to Magdalen College, which, being taken up with the restoration of the college buildings, had no spare money to pay for a picture even if they had wanted to buy ...”

“... shelf. Get out as early as you can,   And don’t have any kids yourself. The Lamberts – painter George (1873-1930), composer-conductor Constant (1905-51), and manager of The Who, Kit (1935-81) – got out as early as they could, and of the two who had kids neither showed paternal enthusiasm or skill. The misery deepened fully in Kit – the ...”

“... more precise theory and practice of language than the on-going bustle of narrative will allow for. George Meredith, to take a good example, plays havoc with the expected sequence of events, expanding and contracting particular elements of the plot so that we can feel the sinews of narrative creaking and cracking under the strain. Then he turns round and ...”