As on a votive tablet.

Horace. From Horace in the first century bc to Jomier in the twenty-first century ad, a fraternity of diarists leave their lives to posterity in words – tablets, papyrus, scrolls, parchment, books, memory sticks. Epitaphs on gravestones are mere markers: De Profundis says much more about Oscar Wilde than the lip-marks of venerating gays on his tombstone in the Père Lachaise. There is more to Marx than ‘Workers of All Lands Unite’ chiselled on to his tombstone in Highgate Cemetery. But for every De Profundis or Kapital there are ten thousand books by forgotten authors. Transient vanity? Perhaps. ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity’ – Ecclesiastes. ‘All that me, me, me . . .’ – Updike. His judgement on contemporary fiction. And his own? Will Updike’s novels one day be stacked unread by future generations like those of Nobel Prize-winners such as Bjørnson, Eucken, Carducci, Benavente, Reymont, Deledda, Heidenstam? Who now reads Sully Prudhomme, Romain Rolland or Roger Martin du Gard? Is each generation doomed to T. S. Eliot’s ‘provincialism of the present’ – the spin-off from a belief in Progress; the assumption that we are more humane and enlightened than our forefathers; that each generation builds on the knowledge of the one that has gone before; that art like science is progressing towards an endgame of total enlightenment when mankind will have created all that is worth creating and knows all that it needs to know?

It is ten to one. Jomier leaves the London Library and walks across St James’s Square in the spring sunshine towards the Athenaeum on Pall Mall where he is to lunch with his friend Theo. The Athenaeum is almost empty. So too was the London Library. It is officially a workday but most workers are not working: they have already left London for the bank holiday weekend. Theo is not displeased. He clearly enjoys having the club’s waiters and flunkeys at his beck and call. As they drink dry sherry, Jomier teases his friend. Should a devout Christian be quite so happy to be served rather than serve? Theo: the best form of charity is employment. It provides not only a livelihood but also self-respect. How much better that Andro the Croatian, Bekim the Albanian, Clarita the Filipina should serve Theo and Jomier in Pall Mall than loiter unemployed on the street corners of Zagreb, Tirana or Manila. (And better, thinks Jomier, that the Brazilian Maria should now be ironing his shirts than selling her body on the streets of Rio de Janeiro.)