It is a truth universally acknowledged that modern politicians routinely churn out prefabricated reading lists as an easy claim to intellectual gravitas.

When Gordon Brown swaps the hurly-burly of Downing Street for the peace of a sun lounger in Cape Cod this summer, we can be sure that he will not be secretly dipping into the latest Danielle Steele.

Arguably our most profoundly bookish leader since Churchill, Mr Brown has revealed his summer reading selection exclusively to The Times. The first two choices are fairly predictable: The Assault on Reason by Al Gore, the former US Vice-President; and The Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board.

His third choice, Engleby by Sebastian Faulks, is a more intriguing choice. It is a novel set largely at an Oxbridge college in the 1970s about a young man from humble origins who studies hard, enjoys music and literature and becomes a Fleet Street journalist. Yet, when it comes to understanding people and making friends, there is something missing. “My own diagnosis of my problem is simple,” he explains. “It’s that I share 50 per cent of my genome with a banana and 98 per cent with a chimpanzee.”

The novel was suggested to Mr Brown by Mariella Frostrup, a friend of his wife Sarah, while she was interviewing him for Sky Arts at the Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts.

A Sky spokesperson said: “The book touches on politics and education at a time when Gordon Brown was studying at Edinburgh University.”

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