The politics of book shelves

I pulled a Canadian girl in a nightclub, back when I was in my very early twenties. She seemed very nice, if somewhat quiet. We went back to her place, where I spent an agreeable night. I sneaked out just after dawn while she was still sleeping and, upon looking under the bed for my socks (I always used to take them off back then), saw every book Ayn Rand had ever written neatly stacked up, in alphabetical order. Not just The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, but Anthem and Ideal and The Virtue of Selfishness and all the rest, the ones even Rand cultists have forgotten. I scarpered for the Tube double quick. A narrow escape.

I don’t remember much else about the lass apart from the fact that she had inverted nipples. But they didn’t scare me as much as those Ayn Rand books. It was like finding weedkiller and fuses in her basement, or something. In those days I was as stupid and censorious about supposedly right-wing literature as the entire left seems to be today, and thought darkly that my Canadian friend would have been better off giving one to Sir Keith Joseph, or maybe Barry Goldwater, rather than me. A year or two later I had grown up and not long afterwards read Atlas Shrugged, which I found turgid and soulless but not uninteresting. Realising, suddenly, that my Labour party membership card did not, by law, prevent me from reading stuff with which I might possibly disagree or at which I might take offence was an enormously beneficial dawning. It meant I could read literally anything! What an awakening.

Some jackass scribbler and contributor to the Guardian, Hicham Yezza, likened Michael Gove to the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik for having stuff by Rand, David Irving and Charles Murray on his bookshelves, as if possession of these works necessarily meant he agreed with them all.