Tony Blair confesses that he enjoys crime fiction

FORMER prime minister Tony Blair has revealed his reading habits, disclosing that he is a fan of detective fiction.

In an article on the books that shaped his life, Mr Blair said his reading choices while growing up included Agatha Christie's murder mysteries.

Today he picks up the detective genre, "which has become really sophisticated", alongside a "heavy or historical book".

He told Easy Living magazine that he was currently reading A History Of Christianity, but joked that he would be perceived as "some kind of religious nutter".

Mr Blair, whose own memoir, A Journey, turned up in unexpected places after a Facebook group was set up to "subversively" move it to "the crime section in bookshops", said he had read the trilogy of books by The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo author Stieg Larsson. But he suggested that he did not enjoy modern novels as much as the classics, saying: "I think we have almost lost the ability to write in such beautiful language."

Unlike his wife Cherie, who "devours books and reads all the modern novels", he said: "I've always loved the great 19th century authors".

He said JRR Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings stood out as a book which he read in his late teens, due to his father's influence