Ala recherche du temps perdu is founded on a gesture so famous that it’s hard to retain the idea of its risk. The narrator (and to some extent Proust himself) decides to build a whole long novel on an ...

In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel (whose French title was originally translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past) was hailed as a masterpiece when it was originally ...

British cinema is often ribbed for its over-dependence on costume dramas, but the taste for corsets and cutlasses has proved at least equally enduring across the Channel. The illustrious tradition of ...

Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. The subtitle of this entertaining biography describes CK Scott Moncrieff as a “Soldier, Spy and Translator”. But Jean ...

This year has been punctuated by a rash of anniversary-themed books and articles anticipating the first world war centenary, and indeed attempting snapshots of how Europe looked and felt in 1913, ...

Marcel Proust wrote “the idea of popular art…if not actually dangerous seemed to me ridiculous.” Locked far away from society in his cork-lined room (why cork? Why not? It blocked out useless sound ...