A lighter side of a political heavyweight ... Gordon Brown. Photograph: Andrew Parsons/PA

So Gordon Brown still has time to fit in a little light reading among the red boxes. His appearance on Radio 4's Open Book yesterday offered a glimpse of a softer, more human side of the iron .... stop me if you've heard this one before.

He revealed to Mariella Frostrup that he "loves fiction", that biographies fascinate him because they tell us "what makes people tick", and that he was "surrounded by books" as a child.

He also chose his five "all-time favourite books", a list that impresses Ben Macintyre over at the Times with its highbrow nature - "a hardback library for a hard mind". Now, I'm as big a fan of the work of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler as the next man, but if this is a genuinely highbrow list, we really are in trouble.

Macintyre is also convinced that the list gives us an insight into the very heart of the prime chancellor, so for what it's worth, here it is:

The Snail and the Whale by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler Unbowed by Wangari Maathai Britons by Linda Colley Docherty by William McIlvanney The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse edited by Roger Lonsdale

I leave it to you to judge whether it has more to say about the results of the latest focus groups or the genuine disposition of the iron minister's bedside table ...