OUR PARIS correspondent, Tom Heneghan, a New Yorker who has reported from all over the world, tells us that the Welsh novelist Ken Follett has donated the earnings from his latest book, Notre-Dame: A Short History of the Meaning of Cathedrals, to the restoration of the Gothic Cathedral of Saint-Samson in Dol-de-Bretagne, a small town in Brittany.

It’s handily placed for Follett to keep an eye on progress. “I really like the west of France,” Follett says. “It’s close enough to England that I can drive there in a day.” Follett wrote a string of successful spy thrillers before scoring his biggest success with Pillars of the Earth, about medieval cathedral builders.