I am in that happy stage of having just started a book - the new Serrailler - and planning ahead in a notebook. I don`t plan very far ahead but I need to get a balance as the story-lines appear and I also like to see ahead to the set pieces. It was Hardy who taught me about set pieces - the big scenes, the high points. He was so good at them and his are often lit like those Dutch Old Masters in their paintings of Biblical scenes - nativities lit by candlelight or the tawny glow of lanterns, groups highlighted by a ray of sun in an otherwise shadowy landscape. Hardy is a most painterly novelist. You go through the novels and see how often he does it. One of the most memorable scenes is in The Return of the Native, when Damon Wildeve and Clym Yeobright play dice on Egdon Heath by the light of hundreds of glow-worms. I have just finished re-reading Giuseppe de Lampedusa`s THE LEOPARD, after a gap of exactly 50 years. I moved to a new city and a new school for my 6th form in 1958, and discovered a world of new books. Lampedusa`s novel had just been published and the whole sixth form seemed to be reading it. I did but I don`t think I fully appreciated its glory then. It is a magnificent portrait of the end of an era and a dynasty, like the novels of Joseph Roth when he portrays the slow, dying fall of the Franco-Prussian empire. Lampedusa`s prose is rich as an old-fashioned fruit cake and as packed with plums and its great set-piece is the ball, towards the end of the book. I read it twice yesterday just to marvel how he does it.

Lampedusa only finished this one novel. I wish he had written more but perhaps it doesn`t matter. To save everything up and work on one book for half your lifetime, when it is a masterpiece like this, is glory enough for any writer.  I can`t press it upon you strongly enough and a new paperback edition was issued last autumn as a Vintage Classic.

Meanwhile, back to the scene set in the art gallery and the one set in the graveyard and the one in which Simon Serrailler...