Rather, he disappeared into his study to read political philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Kant, Pascal, Hegel, Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu. He read Toynbee, Gibbon, and the memoirs of statesmen (all of Churchill’s), biography, and some fiction, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (but not, unfortunately, the tragedies of Sophocles, Euripides, or Shakespeare).48
