In this book Denis Healey takes the opportunity to dwell on the literary influences that have shaped his life and, by quoting favourite passages and reflecting on how writers and thinkers such as John Buchan, W. B. Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Traherne, William Blake, W. H. Auden, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Vaughan, Charles Dickens, Ivan Turgenev, Immanuel Kant and John Muir, to name but a few, have helped to develop his thoughts, he has produced a remarkable testament to the development of a formidable and questioning intellect. Those who enjoy discovering new authors will find this book an inspiration.

Ranging through childhood, university, the army, politics, the arts and the mature years of a great statesman, My Secret Planet is a Baedeker to the mind of a politician who has lived through the decisive events of the post war era and, on many occasions, helped to shape them.