As close to being a definitive version of the great novel as we are likely to get

Sublime... In Proust's interweaving of romantic delusions, the glory of the descriptions, as the narrator strives to recapture the past, redeems everyone

The way he replicates the workings of the mind changed the art of novel-writing forever...his style is extraordinary, enveloping, captivating

Proust isn't just the most profound of novelists, but the most entertaining, too. No reader ever forgets his most killingly funny scenes... Proust sinks deepest in readers because the book is so exhaustively analytical, so ceaselessly truthful. Not the least of it is the book's heavenly length, so that it inevitably takes over your life for a long stretch... the experience of reading it becomes, in itself, an unforgettable thing

Surely the greatest novelist of the 20th century

A sense of ambiguity and fluidity, of there being no absolutes, only relativities, is dazzlingly displayed in The Good Soldier

My favourite novel... You expect a boring novel about Edwardian marriages. This could not be more misleading. It’s a gothic melodrama with a high body count