WILLIAM GLADSTONE

 Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
August 16, 2021

William Gladstone, four times Prime Minister of Great Britain, had a library of 32,000 books. We know—because he make a note in his diary every time he finished reading a book—that he read 22,000 of them. Assuming he did so over the course of eighty years (he lived to be 88), this meant that he read on average 275 books a year, or more than five books each week for a lifetime. He also wrote many books, on a wide variety of topics, from politics to religion to Greek literature, and his scholarship was often impressive.