Marcel Proust was born in the wrong century. For a man who loved listening to music but who for periods of his life was reluctant to leave his bed, let alone his flat in Paris, getting himself to concerts was a chore. He tried two solutions to this problem. In 1911 he became a subscriber to Théâtrophone, a service that held a telephone receiver up at a concert and relayed it to people’s homes. Phones then, of course, had sound quality one step up from tin cans joined by a wire. It wasn’t that the reproduction was low-fi rather than hi-fi. It wasn’t even fi. What he really wanted was live music at home. And so it happened that one night in 1916 the French violinist and quartet leader, Gaston Poulet answered the doorbell at 11p.m. to find Marcel Proust on the doorstep. Proust had an unusual proposition. Would Poulet round up the rest of the quartet and come and play Cesar Franck’s String Quartet in D major that night at Proust’s flat? He had a taxi waiting. So that’s what they did. They played the piece in Proust’s candlelit bedroom while Marcel reclined on a green divan. It must have been good. When they finished at 2a.m. Proust asked them to play it again.

Proust was born about 100 years too early. Spotify would have been a godsend. But then again, if he’d lived in the era of video cameras and social media he might not have seen the point of recreating the past in written form. We don’t see the need to go In search of lost time. We carry it around with us.