Alistair Horne has a delightful piece in today’s Independent reflecting on the dinner he went to with George W. Bush and what politicians learn from history. I was particularly struck by this anecdote:
One wonders if what the Prime Minister needs to do right now is to kick his shoes off and read some fiction. As Iain Martin has long argued, a holiday might help Brown get back to somewhere near top form.But probably the best read of any, not only in history, was Harold Macmillan. To fight the “Black Dog” of depression, he would regularly lock himself away for hours at a time to read. He claimed to have re-read the whole of George Eliot during the Suez Crisis of 1956.
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