L. Meet a member

MEET A MEMBER

Roving journalist Pádraig Belton takes Library books everywhere

It’s been five years since I joined The London Library. I’d moved away from Oxford and needed to fill the void left by the Bodleian and the 24-hour library at Trinity, which I’d made a lot of use of at 3am. The Library has become my spiritual home. I guess I’m a “collector” of the hidden desks – I remember finding an utterly secluded one at the top of the Back Stacks and thinking, “I’m never leaving it.”

I’ve made a living writing global business and technology features for the BBC for the past 22 years. I also write for the Guardian, and I’ve written five short books on international economics and intellectual history for Routledge, which the Library wisely doesn’t hold. I’m just finishing a doctorate in politics, which I’ve been getting through at the pace of a slug.

The Library’s books have accompanied me wherever I’ve been. Middlemarch came to Ukraine, Parade’s End to China, The Picture of Dorian Gray to Siberia and I’ve been working my way through Proust everywhere else. I started out as a foreign correspondent after some terrible advice from John Simpson, the veteran war correspondent. I asked him what he would do in my shoes, and he said, “I’d get on a flight to Ukraine, ring Broadcasting House and start pitching, because they don’t have anyone out there.” It turned out the flights were cheap because no one in their right mind wanted to go there. But I did it and that’s how my career started.

I live between a hotel in Dublin and a succession of sofas in London. The London Library’s Back Stacks are my heaven of constancy. I come straight from Heathrow with too many bags and deposit them by the hat rack, which is glorious, and so are the Member Services team.

During lockdown, the Library posted endless books to me in Dublin – Betty Friedan, Patrick Leigh Fermor and others – to keep me as sane as I could be. I also joined the St John Ambulance as a volunteer. When I’ve been in London, I’ve been changing into my uniform, like a geekier Clark Kent, in the second-storey lavatories.

I love The London Library like a lover, one I’m very faithful to. Whenever I go into the Reading Room, I remember that George Smiley has a favourite desk here in the Le Carré novels. Once, amid the grilles, a woman’s brooch fell through two floors and ended up in a bin beside me. I didn’t ever get her name. But, I thought, I’ve always wanted to meet someone that way. •

As told to Deniz Nazim-Englund

112 Jermyn Street www.emmettlondon.com