'You Should Take a Book of Poetry'

“The Brains Trust” was a BBC radio show popular in the nineteen-forties and -fifties. A panel of “experts” – among them Desmond MacCarthy, Kenneth Clark and Rose Macaulay – would answer questions submitted by listeners. The U.S. had similar radio programs at the time, such as “Information Please,” hosted by Clifton Fadiman. In 1942, Hutchinson and Co. published The Brain Trust Book, a collection of edited transcripts from the show, one of which was devoted to the “Classical Book-shelf.” Mr. D. E. Griffith of Compton Bassett, Wiltshire, asked the panelists to recommend “eight half-crown classics for a soldier to take on active service.” As I read the responses, I wondered how “experts” would answer in 2025. 

C.E.M. Joad, though described as a “philosopher,” sounds more like a dubious media opportunist. He recommends taking “a book of understandable pleasant philosophy,” specifically the World Classics edition of Selections from Plato, introduced by Sir Richard Livingstone.

 

Commander A.B. Campbell was a naval officer, a veteran of the Great War and a radio celebrity. He answered: “I am glad I come in second. I fancy everybody will want to say this. I certainly think that Shakespeare’s works should be one book to take with him.”

 

I’m reminded of the answers politicians give when asked to name their favorite or most influential book. Shakespeare is a perfectly respectable answer but one is left to wonder.

 

Malcolm Sargent was a British conductor, organist and composer. His answer: “If I could take only one book, I would take the Bible.”

 

The evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley replied: “I think it is good to have some good, long novel to get your teeth into and I should have thought that (especially for a soldier) Tolstoi’s War and Peace was unrivalled. You should also take a book of poetry and it should be a selection. If the Oxford Book of English Verse is in a cheap edition, that would be ideal. If not, The Golden Treasury.”

 

Joad seconds Huxley’s choice of War and Peace and adds two novels by Trollope. “They are,” he says, “both in the way of being classics and both are absolutely first-rate. History? I would like to suggest Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which I think is the greatest history book ever written.”

 

Few would argue with that judgment but think of the enlisted man at El Alamein  carrying all six volumes -- 1.6 million words -- in his pack. Joad adds:

 

“One other suggestion I would like to make and it is this. I think Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is one of the greatest books ever written [and a well-known morale-booster]. It happens to be in Everyman, price 2/6, and it is extraordinarily topical. The last satire about the Divine forces and the human being who Swift called ‘Yahoo’ is extraordinarily apt to the moment. I won't say to what nation it happens to be apt. Let the soldiers read it and find out.”

 

Commander Campbell gets in the last word: “It may sound dry reading, but one of the most interesting books I’ve read has been Motley’s History [Rise] of the Dutch Republic.” That’s three volumes, roughly 300,000 words.