There’s a brilliant paradox to this literary storm in a cup of lime flower tea, and that is that in the first draft of the novel, it was not a madeleine but a tartine – a slice of bread spread with jam – that caused the collapsing of time between Proust’s past and his conscious present. “It was Proust’s editor who scored it out and replaced it with... See more

In fact, many scholars argue it is the book’s true beginning. “One way of thinking about it is that the novel has a ‘false start’, says Ffrench. “The writer is struggling to remember his past, and can’t get beyond a particular point so he gives up on it... declaring his childhood town of Combray being ‘to me in reality all dead. Permanently dead?... See more

When Proust wrote of the heady succession of memories that flow from “the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it” – the aunt’s bedroom, their old grey house, the garden, even “the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray” – he articulated an feeling with... See more

In France, a madeleine de Proust is a common expression referring to a smell, taste or sound which dredges up a long-lost memory.

Proust is best known for his confectionary choices, thanks to one scene early on in the book, when a mouthful of “those short, plump little cakes...which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell” unlocks the protagonist’s memory of his aunt Leonie who on Sunday mornings would feed him “a little crumb of... See more

Proust created not just a novel, but a universe, vividly and exquisitely rendered over 1,267,069 words that are as remarkable for their psychological accuracy as they are for their quantity. As Graham Greene observed: “For those who began to write at the end of the 1920s or the beginning of the 30s, there were two great inescapable influences:... See more