A Night at the Majestic - Softcover

Davenport-Hines is one of out finest writers of non fiction, with a habit of landing on fascinating topics.A sheer pleasure to read. (Frances Spalding Daily Mail 2006-02-24)

For sheer, toe-curling, napkin-chewing, electrocution-level embarrassment, nothing can come close to the first and only meeting between James Joyce and Marcel Proust: the dinner-party pairing from hell. (Ben Macintyre The Times)

Davenport-Hines book is wholly engrossing. (Simon Callow The Guardian 2006-02-11)

Proust seems to cast a magic spell over those who write about him ... Richard Davenpost-Hines has now produced a rich and scintillating piece of literary history with Proust as its biographical centrepiece ... A Night at the Magestic is a veritable box of delights, a celebration of early 20th century Parisian high life, elegantly-written, full of lively anecdote and acute observation. (Independent on Sunday 2006-01-29)

Shrewd, perceptive, informed and informative. (John Banville Irish Times (Dublin) 2006-02-11)

Suppose you could have a dinner party and invite the ideal guests. It's an odd ides isn't it? The thing is, this isn't fantasy, or even fiction. There actually was a dinner party in a grand hotel in Paris in 1922 which was attended - if that's the right word - by Proust, Joyce, Picasso, Diaghilev and Stravinsky. The suitably grandly-named Davenport-Hines recreates the event bite by bite (Irish Times (Dublin) 2006-12-31)

Richard Davenport-Hines, in this imaginative, gracefully written book, helps Marcel Proust fulfil his wish to preserve beyond death ... Davenport-Hines devises a modernist structure with deference to classical unity: modernism has its roots in antiquity; its revolt was against Victorian repression, not Grecian liberty. Between them, he evaluates the issues that informed the Proust's life and work ... Davenport-Hines offers an illuminated window to both Proust and his work. (Diana Souhami The Independant 2006-01-27)

The new fashion in non-fiction publishing is for books that cross-cut normal biographical channels and to give a snapshot of several famous people gathered at one place at one time. There are many examples of this but the one not to miss is Richard Davenport-Hines's A Night at the Majestic. (Giles Foden Conde Nast Traveller (UK edition) 2006-12-01)

Richard Davenport-Hines reveals in his new book A Night at the Majestic, the gathering was much more than an "afterparty" - it came to represent the high point of European Modernism, and one of Paris's defining moments as a cultural capital ... He sums up the zeitgeist that bought these five artistic giants together. (Alice Jones The Independent 2006-01-25)

Here is a book that puports to be much less interesting than it is ... A Night at the Majestic isn't really about a dinner party, it isn't really about personalities at all; it's about class and homosexuality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries ... What he does is [sic?] distill themes from Proust's greatest novel A la Recherche de Temps Perdu, such as society, sex, and servants, and manipulate them with great skill and intelligence, to produce a most complete and sufficient sense of Proust, his world and his book than would seem possible from a work of this modest size ... Most novelists who attempt the future can only describe their own time; but Proust, remembering the past, forsaw the future ... Davenport-Hines's excellent study deserves to be read, even by non-Proustians, for the wit of his insights and the delicacy of his historical sense. It is a great thing to read a book entirely free, as this is, from the temporal parochialism that effects so many contemporary historians ... Davenport-Hines possesses a rare intellectual porosity that allows him to adopt this period as his element. (Nicola Shulman Seven (The Sunday Telegraph) 2006-02-05)