I don't really want to pile on, but the irritating part is "whose name is now as lost to me as it is to history". It's still irritating in the context of the paragraph you quoted.

> “I may be a man of fairly wide reading, but I retain nothing.” Retention of everything one reads, along with being mentally impossible, would only crowd and ultimately cramp one’s mind.

From later in the article. I took the "whose name is now as lost" as a forward reference to the later concept. Reading so much that specific facts are lost (like who he was quoting) while retaining the understanding of the quote itself.

He is making the point that in your lifetime you experience a long procession of politicians and other celebrities who are thought important for a while and are then forgotten. That is why, as he says later (twice), he is not interested in reading thick biographies of formerly famous politicians.

I think some commenters here are missing the intended tone of the article. It's supposed to be a confection, an amusing and self-deprecating defense of his old-fangled preferences, with a melancholy tinge about running out of time (the author is in his eighties).

How so? It's clearly linking the idea that the person's name being lost to history is connected to being the type of person who lists reading on the same level as other incidental hobbies.

It reads as haughty, overwrought, and cliche to me. To each their own I suppose.