By Brian Wheeler Political reporter, BBC News

Mahatma Gandhi may seem an unlikely role model for Gordon Brown - but he is not the first great historical figure to be cited as an inspiration by the chancellor.

John F Kennedy embodied a sense of optimism

Figures as diverse as Nelson Mandela,free market economist and fellow Scot Adam Smith, Huckleberry Finn author Mark Twain and American Civil War leader Abraham Lincoln have all been mentioned in dispatches in recent years.

And as Mr Brown adopts an ever more prime ministerial stance - in preparation for the expected handover of power later this year - his hero worship has escalated to new heights.

Former US president John F Kennedy is a particular favourite.

Like many politicians, including Tony Blair, Mr Brown appears drawn to the optimism and sense of purpose he sees embodied in the Kennedy era.

Last weekend, he even suggested that a sense of "national mission" - like that in America which put a man on the moon - could be a model for the more prosaic effort to provide "lifelong learning" for Britain's workforce.

"We need to mobilise all our resources around this, so that we ensure the potential of every person in our country contributes, and indeed determines, the prosperity of all," Mr Brown told a Fabian Society conference.

The chancellor - a history graduate, lest we forget - is also fond of quoting Kennedy views on global "interdependence", which is emerging as one of his key foreign policy themes.

James Maxton formed a breakaway party

Mr Brown also looks to Winston Churchill for foreign policy inspiration, as he did again in an interview with the BBC's Nick Robinson earlier on Friday.

The great political hero of Mr Brown's youth was an altogether more gritty and working class figure.

James Maxton, leader of the Independent Labour Party, which broke away from Ramsay MacDonald's Labour Party in 1931, was a feature of Mr Brown's life for more than 20 years, as he struggled to complete a biography of the Clydeside MP.

The book was finally published in 1986, although there are few signs that Maxton's commitment to Marxism has left any traces on Mr Brown's thinking.

If anything, the lesson the chancellor appears to have drawn from Maxton's career is not to sacrifice political influence on the altar of idealism - or damage the Labour party with splits and feuds.

Gandhi is admired for his 'courage'

Another of the Chancellor's lifelong passion - football - also appears to be a source of inspiration for him.

He recently illustrated his passion for education with a quote - not from a leading educationalist or historical figure - but Thierry Henry, the Arsenal striker, who said: "I score every goal with my head."

He was aiming for an altogether loftier effect when he cited Mahatma Gandhi as a source of inspiration when pondering the challenges facing the world.

But he was also at pains to stress, in a BBC interview, that it was not necessarily Gandhi's pacifism that he wished to emulate, so much as his "courage" and "will power".