'No biography has ever before thrown so much light on the making of a masterpiece. ' Raymond Mortimer. 'Mr Painter has done his work so well that it is hard to speak in moderate terms of his skill and unobtrusive wit. ' Anthony Powell. 'Brilliant and scholarly. . . . Mr Painter's greatest triumph is in his depiction of place and people, his revelation of the raw material of the novel. ' Angus Wilson. With A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU Marcel Proust achieved a perfect rendering of life in art, of the past created through memory. It is both a portrait of the artist and a discovery of the aesthetic by which the portrait is painted, and it was to have a seminal influence on twentieth-century literature. George Painter's work has brilliantly captured the life of the great writer in a TOUR DE FORCE of scholarly research and literary craft.