For many years, Roger Shattuck has been mesmerised by one write. First came "Proust's Binoculars", a short, brilliant study published in 1964. Then came "Marcel Proust", commissioned by Frank Kermode for the Modern Masters series, which won the National Book Ward in 1974. A series of essays, lectures and reviews followed. Now, like Richard Ellmann, whose constant outpourings on Joyce resulted in his triumphant biography "James Joyce", Roger Shattuck has revisited his earlier writings and musings on Proust, and used them as a springboard to write a new and definitive work. Devoting particular attention to Proust's masterpiece "In Search of Lost Time", Shattuck laments his subject's defencelessness against zealous editors, praises some translations, examines Proust's place on the path of aesthetic decadence blazed by Baudelaire and Wilde, and presents him as a novelist whose philosophical gifts were matched by his irrepressible comic sense. This book is the culmination of a lifetime of scholarship; it should delight and enthral readers, and serve as the next generation's guide to Proust.