Read any good books lately? Not novels, alas

In one respect I am like Gladstone, of whom a friend said, ‘He reads as other men breathe.’ To me, reading is my most frequent, enjoyable and essential activity. Not that I put myself on a level with Mr G, even in this respect. He read a portion of the Bible and of Homer every day, the former usually, the latter invariably in Greek. His diary, which he kept daily from 1825 (aged 15) to 1895 (85) records the reading of over 20,000 books. There were many more not mentioned. He accumulated 100,000 volumes, which now form the nucleus of the Gladstone Library at his house, Hawarden Castle, near Chester, where scholars can reside and work for a modest fee. The bulk of his reading was of a seriousness nobody today could (I think) match, but it was also frivolous and included countless novels, as well as many expert books he read out of a ubiquitous curiosity and passion for detail. Thus on 28 October 1853 (just as the Crimean war began), he noted: ‘Read Colt on his revolvers.’ This was a formidable treatise by the weapons-designer Samuel Colt entitled On the Application of Machining to the Manufacture of Rotating Chambered-Breeched Fire-arms and their Peculiarities.

To find a much-reading prime minister in my day I would have to go back to Macmillan. Harold Wilson told me, ‘I read sagas like The Crowthers of Bankdam.’ Mrs Thatcher certainly read books but almost invariably for a purpose, rarely for entertainment and never in the desultory fashion of confirmed bookworms. I once recommended her to go right through the Bible, from Genesis to the Apocalypse, and she said, ‘Good idea!’ and did it. Did John Major read? Who knows, or cares? Tony Blair never reads a book and I have long given up recommending titles to him.