Marcel Proust - author of the seven-volume modernist masterpiece In Search of Lost Time - was the great observer. ‘There has never been anyone else with Proust’s ability to show us things,’ remarked Walter Benjamin. ‘Proust’s pointing finger is unequalled.’

In an age in which smartphones, social media and fake news monopolise and distort our attention like never before, Proust’s unrivalled eye for detail and ability to see beneath the surface - whether in such matters as love and art or at the level of society and politics - have never been more relevant nor more useful to us.

To guide us through the life, work and mind of this most brilliant and singular of writers are the psychotherapist and author Jane Haynes, whose 2008 memoir Who Is It That Can Tell Me Who I Am (Little Brown) was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize for literary autobiography, and whose 2018 book If I Chance to Talk A Little Wild (Quartet Books), was published to critical acclaim; and author, historian and biographer Richard Davenport-Hines - Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature and former Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and the author of nineteen books, including A Night At The Majestic: Proust and The Great Modernist Dinner Party of 1922 (Faber).

Curated in collaboration with writer Mark Pullinger, Hatchards invites you to join us on a journey back in time to early twentieth-century Paris for what promises to be a scintillating evening of wine, literature and conversation.

Proust in The Age of Distraction - at Hatchards Piccadilly