There’s that old saying, “Show me the desk, and I’ll show you the man” or was it “Desks maketh the man”? Either way, this was my desk back in 84 (or thereabouts). Since the titles are not readable in this picture, I’ll take the egotistical liberty of detailing them from the original photograph. Maybe they give a clue as to who I was or who I wanted to be, or maybe it’s all a joke. From left to right we have Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”; Anthony Burgess “A Clockwork Orange”; Franz Kaftka “Metamorphosis and Other Stories”; Thomas Mann “Death in Venice”; Malcolm Lowry “Under The Volcano”; Jonathan Swift “Gulliver’s Travels”; Herman Melville “Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories”; John Pearson “The Profession of Violence” (the story of the Krays); Nicholas Tomalin and Nicholas Hall “The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst”; Flann O’Brien “At Swim Two Birds”; John Fowles “The Magus”; James Joyce “Dubliners”; D H Lawrence “Sons and Lovers”; Aldous Huxley “Brave New World”; William S Burroughs “Junky”; Oscar Wilde “The Picture of Dorian Grey” ; Thomas De Quincey “Confessions of An English Opium Eater”; Jackson Pollock art book; Modigliano/Utrillo/Soutine art book; William Burroughs Jnr “Kentucky Ham”; Roget’s Thesaurus; book of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photographs; a readers guide to T S Eliot; Kertesz “Portraits”; Art Pepper’s auto-biography “Straight Life”; Odham’s concise English Dictionary; biography of Malcolm Lowry by Douglas Day; and just in sight, an intact copy of the Sunday New York Times dated March 5 1978 (subsequently destroyed in the process of becoming a work of art in itself). For quite different reasons, I loved each and everyone of these books, with the exception of the James Joyce which was excruciatingly boring. Joyce is a “kings new clothes” merchant if ever there was one. Readers are free to make all or nothing of this. The photo on the top is of someone called Tom Thornbury and on the back it says “With Love, Admiration and Thanks, Tom ‘77”. I must give special credit to Tom, Roger Tagholm and Michael Monaghan for having a significant influence on my literary taste, which had hitherto be bludgeoned by my experience of undertaking English A Level.