Anyone who was a bookish child could probably tell a similar story to mine. Marcel Proust tells one in Swann’s Way , the first volume of his epic novel In Search of Lost Time , when he writes about reading on summer afternoons in the country and not hearing the church bell.

Sometimes it would even happen that this precocious hour would sound two

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And so at last, I found myself staring into space, with my little glass-bottomed boat in my hand, looking forward and looking to the past, thinking about how far I’d come since I was first stuck in Sodom and Gomorrah and how the endless voyage was going to end very soon. My long moment of reading Proust had itself become a Proustian moment, a

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