Labour leader's summer reading list shows an inquiring mind unlike prime minister whose favourite writer is Jeremy Clarkson
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Ed Miliband's summer reading shows a passionate interest in the US where he taught for a year. Photograph: Lydia Goldblatt for the Guardian
At this time of year in France three things happen:
• Les autoroutes are clogged up as (almost) everyone goes on holiday for the month of August.
• A reasonably large proportion of men, who stay behind in Paris for the first two weeks of the holiday period, have affairs.
• French intellectuals pause, reflect and spend the month wading through hefty philosophical tomes. Many of these intellectuals are active politicians who happily talk about the serious books they will be reading.
In Britain at this time of year three things happen:
• People go on holiday but feel guilty about it. If they are public figures they publicise their holiday if it is in Britain but try to keep quiet if they are travelling abroad.
• Affairs are conducted back home, though these are not institutionalised in the way that affairs are de rigeur in France.
• Intellectual politicians, who like to follow the example of their French counterparts, pretend they are having a normal holiday and don't mention their reading list.
Ed Miliband passed the first test because he is holidaying in Devon with his young family. But the Labour leader stumbled on the third by being seen loading up the family car with an iPad and a stack of books which would not be on sale at an airport bookshop. Cue light stories about his reading list.
The Daily Mail seized on one book – Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading – to make obvious jokes about Miliband looking for tips about leadership. But the authors, Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky, are on the faculty of the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Miliband taught at Centre for European Studies at Harvard in 2002.
This is the synopsis of the book on the Guardian books website:
Every day, in every facet of our lives, opportunities to lead call out to us. At work and at home, in our local communities and in the global village, the chance to make a difference beckons. Yet often, we hesitate. For all its passion and promise, for all its excitement and rewards, leading is risky, dangerous work.
Miliband's other books are:
• Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram G. Rajan. Published by Princeton University Press, this won the FT/Goldman Sachs in what the Guardian described as a "lovely piquancy". The Guardian said the award had gone "to an analysis of the global financial crisis that lists as its first cause the growing wealth gap between bankers and other top earners, and the rest of society".
• Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet by Tim Jackson, economics commssioner on Britain's Sustainable Development Commission. In his Guardian review of the book Jeremy Leggett identified this as the key passage:
The idea of a non-growing economy may be an anathema to an economist. But the idea of a continually growing economy is an anathema to an ecologist.
• The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days that Inspired America by Thurstone Clarke. This is an account of Bobby Kennedy's extraordinary campaign for the Democratic nomination in the 1968 US presidential election which ended with his assassination. Vanity Fair ran extracts in 2008.
There is a link between the Clarke and Jackson books. One of RFK's great themes was that a nation's well being should be measured by happiness and not just by economic growth.
A Miliband aide laughed about the picture of the Labour leader and his books:
The picture only caught the light reading. You should have seen the heavy stuff.
So the leader of the Labour party has a genuinely inquiring mind, unlike David Cameron whose favourite writer appears to be Jeremy Clarkson. But some on the left will have one quibble: Miliband seems to show a passion for the US but no interest in the place where he actually lives – Europe.
Bibliophile Tories will acknowledge Miliband's list. But they will say they remain streets ahead. One of the treats of the Christmas and summer holidays is the Reading List prepared by the military historian Keith Simpson who is William Hague's ministerial aide. Simpson's list always contains an eclectic mix of books that raise Westminster's intellectual standing by a few notches.