The year 2022 marks a notable double centenary. It is one hundred years since Marcel Proust died and since the publication of the first volume of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of À la recherche du temps perdu, which held the field for many years despite criticisms of its inaccuracies. Successive revisions of Scott Moncrieff, by Terence Kilmartin (1981) and D. J. Enright (1992), offered a more reliable text, but meanwhile, a completely new Pléiade edition of the French text appeared in 1987–89, replacing that of 1954 and making available extensive materials for the study of the manuscript as it evolved. (The most recent discovery, which came to light only in 2018, consists of the earliest known sketches of the novel, dating from 1907/08; they were published in 2021 as Les Soixante-quinze feuillets.) A fresh translation of the new Pléiade appeared from Penguin in 2002 under the general editorship of Christopher Prendergast, Professor (now Emeritus) of Modern French Literature at Cambridge. In a radical departure from previous practice, each volume of Proust’s novel was assigned to a different translator, with the freedom to make individual decisions about style and register.

Prendergast himself, in Mirages and Mad Beliefs: Proust the Skeptic (2013), evinced doubts about the view that Proust embraced the doctrine of art as transcendent revelation, contending that there was plenty in the novel which called such aesthetic pieties into question. In his new book, Living and Dying with