I got a question in a letter this week that set me thinking, and, to be honest, it didn't take long before I realised I was shamefully ill-equipped to answer it writes Gaby Hinsliff, politics editor.
So I'm looking to well-informed Guardian Unlimited and Observer readers for help.
One of your number wrote in to say he'd read my interview with David Miliband, the new Cabinet minister for the environment and supposed great hope of New Labour.
Miliband quoted from the economist Albert Hirschman's book on the ways in which reactionaries obstruct progress.
My correspondent was after recommendations for other hot reads about political thought, reaching beyond the usual suspects. He expressed a particular interest in those currently being passed around Westminster.
I decided against recommending The Power of a Prayerful Wife by Stormie O'Martain, which was sitting rather intriguingly on a desk when I last went to Chequers to interview the prime minister (though Downing Street swears Cherie isn't reading it).
But I did suggest Gertrude Himmelfarb's The Road to Modernity, which I'm told is a recent favourite of Gordon Brown's, and Asa Briggs' book on Victorian Cities which is another Miliband favourite.
But after that I was stuck for inspiration: I spend so much time watching politics in practice, I never get time to read up on the theory.
However you're a terrifyingly well read lot - so if you could ransack your bookshelves and let me know which political books you've enjoyed/found stimulating/thrown across the room over the years, you'd make my correspondent very happy, and provide a reading list for my next holiday ...
