I'm just back from a conference with many very senior politicians, officials and journalists amongst the participants. It's heartwarming to realise how many of them are serious readers. This is something they can only reveal in the privacy of a conference conducted under the Chatham House rule giving them anonymity, so anti-intellectual are our populist politics and press.

Just one leading politician cited – in the course of two brief interventions – the following books and authors: Antonio Gramsci (Prison Notebooks was the specific reference, I think), Christopher Lasch's The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, Michael Harrington, Sunstein and Thaler's Nudge, Sayiyd Qutb (and the speaker gave every appearance of having read some of his works), and Tariq Ramadan. Another politician strongly recommended Walter Russell Mead's God and Gold to me – I hadn't heard of it before.

Reinhardt and Rogoff's This Time Is Different was much-cited, and must count as one of the most influential books of the past 12 months. And a number of people were reading – or about to read – Barry Eichengreen's Exorbitant Privilege. Others were crossing Dambisa Moyo's latest, How the West Was Lost, on the back of a stinker of a review in this week's Economist, although it has been better reviewed elsewhere. The anonymity of its reviewers certainly assists frankness.