A man tastes a madeleine soaked in tea and the whole of his childhood returns unbidden - the most famous few pages in modern fiction open a novel that is, in fact, about how little we control what we remember. Proust wrote through the night in a cork-lined room and could not find a publisher for the first volume; he paid for it himself. Sixty plates by Claude Monet and his contemporaries follow the garden at Giverny, the Paris streets and the Normandy coast through the same years Proust was writing.