"I have just had a wonderful pre-read of The Spire and it is a wonderful book. I also congratulate you. The last part – anyhow after the Visitor's part – went away from me, but even then the sense of human individuals was maintained. And all through – and this is its great (literary) merit – there is the sense of weight – stone weight. I have only once come across it before in a novel called The Nebuly Coat (author's name forgotten) but there it is only incidental – the central pillars groan to each other despairingly in the night – but in The Spire it's continuous. But how I do deplore Christianity. A Hindu or Egyptian building wouldn't have created half that trouble or been so riddled by that sense of sin."