“On reading The Poet and the Diplomat
(The correspondence of Dag Hammarskjöld and
Alexis Leger, edited by Marie-Noëlle Little (2001),
I came across this gem on page 23:
‘Dag Hammarskjöld was indeed a great humanist
with a strong interest in literature… When a journalist
once asked him which book he would most like to have
if he were stranded on a desert island, he answered:
‘Cervantes' Don Quixote, and preferably in an old French edition.’
The editor also footnoted: ‘This was also Albert Einstein's favorite book.’”
– Peter Y. Chou,
Stanford University