Here's looking at you, kid

    While I go off and write a sensible piece about a terrific book, here's some silliness to be going on with (and it's not even Friday, yet).

    My study faces east so the morning sun is bringing the room to life just now and happens to be illuminating various books. As I sit at my desk and occasionally glance up for inspiration, whose faces do I see looking back at me?

     T.S. Eliot stares, sombrely, fixedly, Philip Larkin looks ... well, as Philip Larkin always looks (I blame the parents), while Kay Graham's demeanour is calm but steely. Out in the hall, where light and dark are opposing forces, as it were, and the crime shelves face those housing Wodehouse and McCall Smith, Ian Rankin looms from a dust jacket in a rather chilling fashion. Back here I've just realised that if Thomas Stearns were to fall off his shelf, the very handsome Anthony Hopkins would then be face out.