I now know who Molly Weir is! Thanks for the clue about Rentaghost, Marian, that did it for me!
'Smiley's People' is a cracking book, Harry, I'm a big fan of that.
And I know what you mean about books fuelling the brain, here is a nugget of trivia I read just the other day and it really left me stunned.
It was in a reference book all about the Solar System.
In it, it said first take the Sun, our Sun, this huge, enourmous body some 870,000 miles in diameter, then take a tiny atom and place it at the opposite end of an imaginery scale dealing with size.
To give you some idea of just how small the atom is, on this sliding scale dealing with size a human would be half way between the two!
That was incredible to me, hope it make sense!
Gray