Imagine if, many years ago, book groups had sidestepped the monstrously unfair stereotype of being populated by thirtysomething women up to their chunky bobs in lady petrol dissecting the latest Mumsnet imbroglio. (If this is hard to bring to mind, think back to the halcyon days of that website’s Penis Beaker thread and crack open an almost chilled bottle of Wolf Blass.)

Think instead of the boost to publishers of impenetrable tomes on international politics written by the big beasts of the literary jungle had the blokes held sway; in other words, had Dominic Raab, newly revealed as a voracious consumer of unfettered verbiage, invited his chums round for a bit of a chinwag on their bedtime reading.

Those of a delicate disposition may not have been able to stomach the backdrop to Raab’s BBC Breakfast interview from his lovely Thames Ditton home. What right-minded person stores their books like that, in squared-off stacks on their window sills, open to the blaze of the sun and the depredations of squirrels and magpies?

But if you could go the distance, it made for interesting viewing. Jonathan Aitken’s foot-breaking life of Richard Nixon; Arnold Schwarzenegger’s autobiography; Ronald Reagan’s diaries; Niall Ferguson’s Virtual History, which imagines our world had critical global events not occurred. No doubt Raab is even now writing a new introduction to Ferguson’s book in which he argues that, whatever alternative scenarios prevail in the future, there will still be bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches for tea.

It’s unlikely that viewers will have reeled back from their television sets in appalled disappointment that Raab did not reach for a line or two of Emily Dickinson at moments of crisis (“How dreary – to be – Somebody!/ How public – like a Frog – To tell one’s name – the livelong June –/ To an admiring Bog!”).

Politicians must surely realise by now that they are on a hiding to nothing when they allow us these minor and undefended glimpses into their cultural lives. Essentially, you have to be Barack Obama, who this summer revealed the books that he is most enjoying at the moment, among them Tara Westover’s Educated, in which the author recalls her childhood in a survivalist cult, Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and Hisham Matar’s The Return. Pretty classy, even if this week the Evening Standard pulled him up for book bragging and suggested the rest of us avoid it.

The only equivalent of note on this side of the Atlantic is Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, who tweets her book recommendations so enthusiastically that she must have zoomed to the top of publicists’ advance copy mailing lists. Last week, she interviewed the novelist Ali Smith at the Edinburgh international book festival and welcomed a group of those who had grown up in care to Bute House to talk about Harry Potter. Reading, she has said, can develop politicians’ empathy.

Also in Edinburgh last week was Jeremy Corbyn, whose favourite book is James Joyce’s Ulysses, which, I must concede, endears him to me greatly, even as I wonder what the committed vegetarian made of Leopold Bloom’s lusty enjoyment of the “inner organs of beasts”, in particular “thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.” Certainly different fare from the somewhat unadorned courgette omelette the Labour leader cooked up on his allotment recently to assuage the annual glut.

Whether Corbyn attended the festival session featuring his former backbench colleague Chris Mullin is unclear; though Mullin certainly lost no time in pointing out the continuing relevance of his 1982 novel, A Very British Coup, which, he argued, foretold Corbyn’s rise.

I struggle to see Corbyn as Harry Perkins, particularly in the screen incarnation written by Alan Plater and played by Ray McAnally. Thirty years after it first aired, I still remember a climactic moment, in which Kika Markham makes a recording of Robert Tressell’s novel The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists and sends it to Perkins in order to give him the strength to fight in the face of establishment skulduggery. Indeed, it was after watching that – I was 19 – that I borrowed the book from my library and made acquaintance with the inhabitants of Mugsborough and the story of “twelve months in Hell, told by one of the damned”.

Back to Raab, and his accounts of great men, told by other men. You have to warm, however grudgingly, to anyone who loses themselves in the details of Arnie’s life. But I might have wished a slightly more wide-ranging list for the secretary of state for exiting the European Union; something with a few more laughs and a bit of light and shade. I will therefore beg his indulgence and make a few suggestions:

1. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann: OK, not a light read and not full of gags, but an interesting insight into what happens when you’re banged up in an institution with a load of Europeans.

2. Puckoon by Spike Milligan: side-splitting tale of Irish citizens smuggling goods across the previous hard Irish border in coffins.

3. Middlemarch by George Eliot: because no list is complete without it.

4. A Small Town in Germany by John le Carré: 50 years old and still its backdrop of Britain’s traumatised efforts to join the Common Market seem weirdly familiar.

5. Expo 58 by Jonathan Coe: a civil servant is packed off to Belgium to protect a fake British pub at an international fair. Predictably, this being Brussels, all does not go according to plan.

You’re welcome, Dominic. I’ll be round this week with the single malt and rest of the lads.

•Alex Clark is an Observer columnist