At least in one respect, the life of the 21st-century columnist must be regarded as an easy one. Most newspaper columns are now written to a length of between 600 and 1,200 words. I have just been reading Thomas Carlyle’s review of Croker’s edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson.

It is more of a column than a review, since it contains more of Carlyle’s opinions than comment on Croker’s editorial skills. It ran to 25,000 words in Fraser’s Magazine in 1832. No modern columnist would dare suggest writing 25,000 words, nor would any editor ask for it.

Sadly, there are some great authors who are no longer much read by ordinary readers. That is not true of Boswell or Johnson, but it is largely true of Carlyle, whom the Victorians almost worshipped as a sage. I know that some of my friends have read The French Revolution and perhaps a few have read On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, a title designed to halt hiccups. But Carlyle remains almost unread even by well-read people.

Journalists, in particular, should read him. Carlyle is the master of the high romantic style. His works are egotistically full of his own personality. Not all journalism is romantic or personal, but a great deal of it does consist of injecting personality into what would otherwise be a long list of facts. The journalist’s function can be to make oatmeal taste like caviar; and no one does that better than Carlyle.

Wherever one opens him, one is impelled to read on. In modern jargon, Carlyle is the master “page turner”. I have picked at random a paragraph from his great essay on the death of Goethe. “So there our Greatest has departed. That melody of life, with its cunning tones, which took captive ear and heart, has gone silent; the heavenly force that dwelled here victorious over so much, is here no longer; thus far, not farther, by speech and by act, shall the wise man utter himself forth. The End!”

Any self-respecting author can make something interesting out of a deathbed scene. One does not have to be Carlyle, or Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, or Evelyn Waugh, to see the opportunities. But who else would have been able to get away with “The End!”? From a lesser hand that would be mocked as an absurdity.

How did I come to be reading Carlyle? It can be blamed on Heathrow. This year we decided that we would avoid Heathrow, which bears more and more the sad character of a Boer War concentration camp, complete with harassed mothers and screaming toddlers. I am tempted to say that Heathrow has now become The End!

We decided to go to Hay-on-Wye out of season, partly because I enjoy buying books I would not otherwise read, but partly to have an excuse to drive back by the Wye Valley road from Monmouth to Tintern Abbey, one of the most beautiful scenic roads in the world. We went out of the festival season because we thought Hay-on-Wye would be less crowded. We stayed at the Swan Hotel, an elegant Regency building with a dining room with windows to the floor, such as Jane Austen describes in Northanger Abbey.

At the bookshop in a converted cinema, I bought Chapman and Hall’s 1857 edition of Carlyle’s essays; it has the ticket of the original bookseller, Robert Walker of Aberdeen, and another ticket saying that the set was bound by Bone and Son of 76 Fleet Street. The four volumes cost £30. I also bought Christopher Hollis’s Doctor Johnson, published by Victor Gollancz in 1928.

Hollis was a young Catholic convert of the 1920s and in his retirement a neighbour in Somerset, a scholar and a Tory Member of Parliament for a Wiltshire seat. His son is the Roman Catholic Bishop of Portsmouth. His life of Johnson is a good, young man’s book, inevitably written from secondary sources; it is interesting to know what a convert in the 1920s made of the great doctor; Hollis had read Carlyle’s essay. The book cost £8.

So we came home, thinking that my mild book spree was over, but well satisfied with our holiday break on the Welsh border. When we got back to Somerset I received a birthday present from our younger son, Jacob. He gave me Locke, A Biography, by Professor Roger Woolhouse of York University, published by Cambridge. This was reviewed in Jacob’s local weekly, the Chew Valley Gazette, but had not been as widely covered in the national press as it deserves.

This is the first comprehensive biography of Locke in 50 years, based on a mass of modern research. If one loves Locke, or liberty, or, indeed, Somerset, this is a book one cannot comfortably live without. Roger Woolhouse is a professor of philosophy, so he can explain the full development of Locke’s philosophical works. He combines that with a warm and fascinating account of Locke’s personal and political life. Locke was born at Pensford, which is about four miles north of Temple Cloud, where I spent my childhood.

Locke’s Somerset life involved places and even families I knew in my childhood or have met since. He was christened at Wrington by the Puritan rector, Doctor Crook, whose descendant, Veronica Crook, has been our family nanny for more than 40 years. Locke’s closest Somerset friend was John Strachey, of the distinguished intellectual family. His descendant, Lord Strachey, was chairman of our local bench of magistrates. In some ways the Somerset of Locke’s youth had changed little by the 1930s.

John Locke was the founding philosopher of English liberalism, the intellectual inspiration of the American Declaration of Independence, the genius of toleration. He was also a doctor, and a scientific one for his age. Professor Woolhouse brings out very well that Locke applied his medical experience to his political thinking. He had “a universal love of all sorts of useful knowledge”. No higher compliment could be paid a philosopher. Carlyle, Locke, Hollis, Boswell, and Johnson have given me a most enjoyable summer.

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