‘I have started to read Proust, 12 volumes, in Scott Moncrieff’s wonderful translation,’ Harold Macmillan wrote in his prime ministerial diary in 1959. ‘I felt I ought to do this, because of the great influence which Proust has had on modern English literature.’ Macmillan, as a publisher, knew that A la Recherche du temps perdu had shaped, modified and swayed the work of countless 20th-century English novelists, essayists and memoir writers, and that Charles Scott Moncrieff’s translation, on which he worked from 1921 until 1929, had mediated that impact on English readers. For generations, Scott Moncrieff was to Proust what Richard Burton was to The Arabian Nights, yet it has taken eighty-four years since his death for a full study of his life and ideas.

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