Terence Kilmartin was a literary editor and translator best known for his revision (almost retranslation) of C. K. Scott-Moncrieff's version of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.
Kilmartin, known as ‘Terry’, was Irish-born but educated in England. His knowledge of French had been honed as a private tutor to a French family. During the war he was deemed medically unfit for service, but nevertheless joined the Special Operations Executive and made a parachute jump into occupied France. He joined the Observer in 1949 as a foreign correspondent – it is said that during the war he had saved the life of the newspaper’s editor David Astor – but later became its exacting literary editor, renowned for his urbane and self-deprecating manner.