In quoting David Cecil about Agatha Christie, it was brought home to me, quite clearly, that I had omitted previously in this series the writer he had noted first as being amongst the most distinguished of his generation. Reflecting on my motive for this, I realized that it was essentially laziness, an unwillingness to read again through a text before I began writing.

For all the writers I had covered previously, memory has been sufficient, supplemented on occasion by reference to a particular work. But in Galsworthy's case, I realized I had forgotten almost everything about his work, save only the highlight of the first novel in his epic series The Forsyte Saga. This was sad, because I remember having been quite impressed with all his works, when I first read him.

That had been at the behest of my great aunt Ida, who much loved the British and had worried in the sixties that I knew nothing of the writers of her youth. Earlier my father, disappointed that my voracious reading was confined to Enid Blyton and C. S. Lewis and suchlike, had drawn attention to my lack of interest in Shakespeare and the Victorians. A determination to prove him wrong soon became a pleasurable obsession, and these then became the staples of my teens – except indeed for Dickens, whose joys I only properly understood nearly a decade later. But in those early years, I had found Galsworthy also fun, reading him from cover to cover in the old Government Agent's Lodge in Kandy, so much so that, a few years later, thinking about my doctoral thesis, I had contemplated a comparison of his epics and those of Trollope.