To step into Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is to enter a sea of sensation, memory, and recollection. But it isn’t only that. In a very real sense, this seven-volume novel is Proust’s record of the lifestyle and interests of his narrator: a gentleman of leisure in late–1800s France. Barely a page goes by without him noting that this or that remembrance reminds him of a play, or a painting, or a piece of music; even the celebrated madeleine prompts memories to “rise up like the scenery of a theater.” Giotto, El Greco, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Turner—these are just a few of the painters Proust cites. And because his years of theater- and gallery-going coincided with Paris’s high Belle Époque, he dipped his toe into everything from Monet to Fauré to Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. This rich cultural life is chronicled in “Proust and the Arts.” —Andrew Pulver