6 NOVEMBER 2004, Page 38

Longer still

From T. T. King Sir: Paul Johnson (And another thing, 23 October) asks whether any reader knows if Proust wrote a longer sentence than Victor Hugo's 823 words mentioned by Graham Robb in his life of that author.

By my admittedly erratic and inaccurate counting he did. In Terence Kilmartin's version of Remembrance of Things Past (Vol II, 1981, pages 638-640) there is a sentence of rumination on inversion which contains (approximately) 937 words, 53 commas, six semicolons, three dashes and one colon. Does it count, being a translation?

T.T. King

Brentwood, Essex

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