Part of the armor . . .

. . . I wore as a young man in a foreign city was not making eye contact. Because, I suppose, I had the sort of eyes that impressed others as belonging to a lost soul (I have tried to change this, with middling results), meeting someone's glance could lead to uncomfortable contretemps, like that time in Cambridge when a stray look around the cafe called forth an eerie guy from the shadows.

But I digress. The point is that there used to be in the seventies a bookshop in London with a life-size ...