Youth may well be wasted on the young. So, in my experience, were libraries. During my years at university I made extensive use of the magnificent Bodleian Library. It was a useful place to park my bike before heading to the pub. But while my spirits never failed to soar when I beheld its graceful lineaments of stone, I can’t say I visited the book stacks all that regularly. Unless you call the Commonwealth Games regular on the basis that it happens once every four years.

It wasn’t that I didn’t read during those years of higher education. I certainly learnt a great deal from chatting late into the night (specifically that Nescafé keeps you up longer than Mellow Birds, Kit Kats fuel the brain better than Mars bars, and the precise moment anyone mentions how life-changing their gap year in Nepal was is a better signal that it is time for bed than even the most advanced atomic clock). But I learnt even more from books. One of the joys of reading English Literature is that you need not go to the Bod to commune with Jane Austen. You just need to pop by Oxfam and you can get Pride and Prejudice for less than the price of a jar of instant coffee.

But now that I am many jars of Maxwell House older, my curiosity leads me down different roads. And into libraries again. Whether it is the London Library in St James’s or the British Library by St Pancras, the shrines to which I make pilgrimage now are those that contain within their depths works long out of print, on 18th-century rakehells and Restoration divines. And as I take steps into the past I’ve never taken before, I now find there are steps from the past I’ll never be able to take again. Specifically the steps on the ladders in the Bodleian. Which are now, it was reported at the weekend, too dangerous to scale under health and safety regulations. So all the books on the higher shelves of the Bod are now, like enriched plutonium or Simon Cowell’s hair, impossible for any human being to touch for safety reasons.

I can appreciate why the thirst for knowledge that once drove man to search for the North West Passage, or brave the virgin rainforests of darkest Papua, might be considered a dangerous appetite. But it comes to something when the thirst for knowledge that prompts you up a step-ladder is, like a thirst for sea water, absinthe or hemlock, considered so reckless that the State has to save people from themselves. Not since the fable of Dr Faustus has mankind’s desire to know more and yet more about the world around him been so associated with risk and danger. We could learn a great deal about our times from his fate. If only his story hadn’t been stacked on the top shelf next to all the other explosive material.

Guilty as charged

Mankind’s restless search for knowledge is about, however, to bring us perhaps the greatest boon of all time. Not a cure for the common cold nor nuclear fusion, not even time travel (although it is true that the world’s bankers have helped to take us back to the 1930s very effectively . . .) No, the real breakthrough, which a deliciously geeky friend of mine informs me is due in 2012, is a single phone-charger that works in every mobile device — from the sleekest Blackberry to the clunkiest Nokia. This breakthrough, to my mind perhaps even more significant than the creation of a single world government or the arrival at a grand unification theory of physics, will transform my life. The present tangle of wires in my living room, which resembles an unruly Gorgon’s head after a sleep-deprived night on the tiles, is one of the terrible banes of my life. Always finding myself, just as my phone is running out, with the charger for my wife’s device in the wrong place at the wrong time, and without the battery power to alert her that her phone is about to go phut too, has become a leitmotiv of our marriage. The plangent dying of the ringtone is as mournful as anything in Wagner.

So with the knowledge that I can get rid of every charger, and have one size that fits all, the prospect of redemption hovers over the horizon. Now I just need to remember actually to flick the switch at the mains . . .

Our not-so-mellow age

Jane Austen at Oxfam may be cheaper than Mellow Birds, but last week Zoë Heller was cheaper than a double espresso with The Times. And even more darkly enjoyable. Her latest novel, The Believers, has as its ostensible heroine Rosa Litvinoff, a daughter of radical parents who embarks on a journey away from socialist certainty towards a nuanced engagement with Orthodox Judaism. Her story, and that of her ungainly, social-worker sister, Karla, is certainly affecting. But the bitter yet bubbly heart of this novel is their mother Audrey, a prize bitch whose lacerating verbal savagery, a bit like Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker in In the Loop, takes you to places that you thought words were not allowed to go for safety reasons.

There is something about our times that mean that those who articulate rage with extra lashings of venom have found their hour. It’s amazing to behold. But perhaps there are also times when a Mellow Birds and Jane Austen make for a more agreeable world.

Michael Gove is the Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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