Our new lockdown game: judging famous people by their bookshelves

Lockdown Britain has added a new dimension to one of readers’ favourite games: nosing around other people’s shelves. With broadcasters and politicians addressing the nation from their own front rooms, it has become easier than ever. Now we don’t even have to go to someone’s home (fortunate in these times) to judge them by their reading habits. Now the libraries of the famous are laid bare for us all to mock or admire.

What does it tell us about Boris Johnson, for example, that he has a collection of big, gold-lettered, red-spined hardbacks that look as if they’ve come straight from the fabled library of Alexandria? Or that Prince Charles keeps a hefty Dick Francis close at hand? MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt and the Washington Post’s White House reporter Seung Min Kim both arrange their books by colour, it seems. Joe Wicks has beautiful shelves with … no books on them. And a screenshot of the “first ever digital cabinet”, shared by the PM, suggests that Jacob Rees-Mogg has one of those dream libraries with dark wood shelves and ladders on wheels.

Of course, broadcasters know that bookshelves say a lot about a person, and some have been cheating. Fox News correspondent Brandi Kruse, for example, tweeted: “Reporters, experts, pundits working from home in front of bookshelves: what is ONE book you removed from your shelf because you didn’t want people to see it. Don’t lie you, know you did. Mine: 365 Ways to Drive a Liberal Crazy (no memory of how it came to be in my possession).” Cynical viewers will obviously allege that some people have deliberately scratched together a pile of books to pose against, while book lovers assume it would be impossible to find a camera angle in any reasonable person’s home that doesn’t reveal a healthy lockdown reading pile.

Here are some of the most interesting bookshelves in the homes of the commentariat. But are they intellectual poseurs or lifelong readers?

Jon Snow

The Channel 4 news anchor set the tone for broadcasting from home with his smart grey suits and well-stocked bookshelves. Snow’s bottom shelf is clearly the art section, with books about Andy Warhol, Aubrey Beardsley, Aristide Maillol, Brâncuşi, Caravaggio and Utagawa Kuniyoshi. There’s an eclectic music shelf, including Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley by Timothy White and Gil Scott-Heron’s memoir The Last Holiday. But Snow is also perhaps following advice to keep healthy and exercise the brain, with Treasures of British History – by his cousin Peter and his son Dan Snow – and The Clever Guts Diet Recipe Book by Dr Clare Bailey.

Dominic Raab

The foreign secretary, on the other hand, appears to have hastily assembled a book collection shortly before appearing on BBC News. Standing in front of a windowsill, he posed with a pile of brand-new-looking books on either side of his head. They included biographies of Richard Nixon and Arnold Schwarzenegger, a book about economics from the Economist, and Niall Ferguson’s Virtual History, which asks questions such as: “What if Britain had stayed out of the first world war? What if Germany had won the second?” What if Raab had already read that book on economics before we got into this mess, we all wondered.

Kate Middleton

“Kate Middleton shows off her incredible book collection in rare picture taken inside her Kensington Palace home,” promised Hello! magazine in a headline guaranteed to excite nosy book lovers. Alas, the photos showed the Duchess of Cambridge with a row of elegant clothbound Penguin Classics that are beautiful, if not as special as “incredible” might suggest. The Duchess is said to enjoy contemporary thrillers such as The Girl on the Train, but this collection is much more canonical. It includes Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park by Jane Austen, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde and Middlemarch by George Eliot.

Nicola Sturgeon

A lockdown is always a good time for a conspiracy theory, and Sturgeon’s bookshelves inspired a great one. The Scottish first minister is known to be a book lover, and her collection shows that she is a loyal supporter of Scottish writers. But why, some asked, were her shelves almost entirely full of Ian Rankins in one interview, and then packed with Val McDermids in another on the same day? Was it something Rankin had said about independence that prompted a cull? Probably not; a closer look shows that Sturgeon had just shuffled her chair one bookcase along.

Rishi Sunak

Dishy Rishi can’t seem to put a foot wrong at the moment, starting with his “kiss of life” budget and climaxing with this working-from-home photo. His housebound admirers swooned over his cosy hoodie, his two screens and his excellent bookshelves. The chancellor scores points for authenticity – this is no last-minute book grab to look clever, but the study of our dreams, including a row of Penguin Popular Classics, which were phased out in 2013. Perhaps he could lend some to his colleague Raab?