That books do furnish a room — as Anthony Powell has it in the title of the tenth novel in his Dance to the Music of Time sequence — is particularly apparent where pubs are concerned. There is nothing like a few old volumes to produce that lived-in feeling.

There was an impressive row immediately behind us at the super new-look Crown in Woodstock as Rosemarie and I tucked into a delicious dinner last week. (You can read about it next week in Weekend.) They were uniform edition, I guessed, of some classic author, Dickens, perhaps, or Walter Scott.

Helping myself to the volume at the end of the row, I found that the author was actually Anthony Trollope. The book concerned was Orley Farm. Had I not had other matters on my plate, so to speak, I could have resumed my reading of the story, for this was the very book (a not particularly well-known one) that I was halfway through at home. I pulled out a second volume. Phineas Redux, my previous Trollope novel.

Spooky, eh?