Look and learn

Politicians have been taking a battering over their response to coronavirus, so I suppose it’s no surprise to learn that they have been accused of curating their bookshelves to appear more intelligent during lockdown television appearances. I reckon most of us have been guilty of this to some extent – there has definitely been a lot of tidying up in my study before Zoom meetings, although not an actual rearranging of books.

At the end of the first week of lockdown, when Matt Hancock revealed he had the dreaded virus and was self-isolating, the health secretary gained several plus points from me at least for definitely not tidying his bookshelves. The style police were not impressed, though. But maybe he felt too ill? Poor man. Michael Gove got a bashing too for the number of books about dictators he had on his shelves as well as one by the Holocaust-denier David Irving. This time, the thought police were not impressed.

The Times recently asked several politicians about their holiday reading. Apart from rereading the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, the Prime Minister chose Brendan Simms’s Britain’s Europe: A Thousand Years of

Conflict and Co-operation as well as Tim Bouverie’s Appeasement and the novel Any Human Heart: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart by William Boyd. Rishi Sunak included Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, Jacob Rees Mogg Glastonbury, ‘The Mother of Saints’, Her Saints AD37-1539 by the Rev Lionel Smithett Lewis (first published in 1927), Michael Gove Haldane: The Forgotten Statesman who Shaped Modern Britain by John Campbell (reviewed here); Sir Keir Starmer, meanwhile, picked The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. No startling responses there. Shame.

Most bookshops have now been open for a while but going inside them still seems rather weird: face coverings, social distancing, hand ‘sanitiser stations’… and quarantining books seems even odder. It’s fine if you know what title you are after but browsing feels distinctly uncomfortable. Clearly, the answer is to know what you want – so where better to look for ideas than inside this supplement.