Anthony Storr

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety three and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:29

My castaway this week is a psychiatrist. Brought up in a quiet ecclesiastical household in the precincts of Westminster Abbey, he remembers his childhood as lonely, cold, and quite poor.

Presenter0:41

An asthmatic himself, he decided he wanted to become a doctor and went to Cambridge. There his life was transformed. With CP Snow as his tutor, he discovered a new confidence and determined to pursue a career in psychiatry, then something of a Cinderella in medical practice. His first book, The Integrity of the Personality, became an essential text book on the subject. Gradually he began to write and teach more and practice less. Now, at the age of seventy two, he's a full time author. His latest work, Music and the Mind, explores his lifelong fascination for music, what it is, and why it can arouse such emotion. He is Doctor Anthony

Presenter1:21

Is there a simple answer to that question, doctor Stoy? I mean, what is music, and why does it reach the parts of us that perhaps other art forms don't?

Anthony Storr1:29

Well, I think music resonates with the body. I mean, the first thing about music is that it really affects you physiologically and it can be measured. I mean, your heart rate increases, your breathing alters, and and your all sorts of things happen to you physically. Listening to music makes you want to move or to dance, but looking at a picture doesn't make you want to dance. I I mean there's a great difference between music and the other arts for this reason.

Presenter1:52

So, do you use it on yourself, as it were, as a kind of calmer-downer or a version of the

Anthony Storr1:58

Oh, it's um yes, I mean, it's a wonderful way of uh relaxing at the end of the day and and of restoring oneself to oneself. I mean, I think if you've been thinking hard all day, as it were, using abstract language and that sort of thing,

Anthony Storr2:13

Music puts you in touch with your feelings again in in a way that uh is incomparable.

Presenter2:19

But it can change your mood as well.

Anthony Storr2:21

Very much so. I mean, uh I think Haydn is my favourite antidepressant. I know no other composer, and I'm not alone in this, who has such a powerful effect on changing the mood if you happen to be feeling depressed.

Presenter2:36

But I I read that ideally you would have liked to have been not a psychiatrist, but a musician.

Anthony Storr2:41

Oh yes, certainly. Music's one of the very few things, I think, where one can passionately want to be a musician without necessarily having the talents to be one. Whereas, I mean, you know, you don't find people passionately wanting to be mathematicians who are no good at math, but you do wo find quite a lot of people like me who are passionately fond of music and wish they'd had both better training and natural skills which uh the great players do have.

Presenter3:10

But, nevertheless, music's been very important in your life. Do you remember the moment when it entered your life? Was there a specific time?

Anthony Storr3:17

Well, it was certainly important to me from the age of sort of eight or nine onwards, and I suppose one of the

Anthony Storr3:25

Great classical bits of music that first affected me was the Bach dub Concerto for two violins, which my brother had a record of of Fritz Chrysler.

Anthony Storr3:37

and uh Ephraim Zimbabwe's playing and that somehow affected me very much and I think I was ten or eleven when that

Anthony Storr3:45

That happened. And then

Anthony Storr3:47

I became passionately addicted to music from

Anthony Storr3:50

That time on.

Presenter3:52

So on your desert island, what's the first record that you put on the gamophone?

Anthony Storr3:56

Well, the first record is one of the tenor arias from the St. Matthew Passion of Bach.

Anthony Storr4:02

And this partly originates in the fact that I used to hear that quite the Mati Passion quite regularly in my childhood, because the Westminster Abbey Choir performed it every year.

Speaker 24:15

Hi, Monica.

Speaker 24:34

Yeah.

Speaker 24:47

Yeah.

Speaker 24:53

Oh Holy Spirit, thy heart is

Presenter5:14

Howard Crook singing the aria Ichvil by Meinem Jezu Wachen from Bach's Saint Matthew Passion, with the English Baroque soloists and the Monteverdi choir conducted by John Elliott Gardner, and memories there for my castaway Anthony Storr of his childhood in and around Westminster Abbey, where where your father was the sub dean.

Anthony Storr5:31

Yes, I mean, he was a canon, and then you went up with the hierarchy gradually. But I was brought up.

Anthony Storr5:38

at Twentydeans Yard from the age of one, and lived there till I was twenty, so the whole of my childhood was in this rather curious background.

Presenter5:46

Will you describe that to me? I mean, what was life like living there?

Anthony Storr5:49

Well, it was very I mean, my parents belonged to the Victorian age,'cause my father was born in eighteen sixty nine, and he was over fifty when I was born, and my mother was very nearly forty five.

Anthony Storr6:01

And so it was very much a Victorian household. In fact, we had family prayers before breakfast, you know, with my father reading a bit of the Bible, then we all said the Lord's Prayer before we had our breakfast, and so on.

Presenter6:12

And you t you you did the chores before breakfast.

Anthony Storr6:15

Oh yes. Well we lived in this huge house which we had to live in. It was an official residence.

Presenter6:15

Two.

Anthony Storr6:21

And of course we hadn't got enough money to pay enough people to clean it, so the whole family used to get together and do some of the housework before breakfast, which I actually very much enjoyed. I learnt how to mop and dust and sweep and lay fires and all those things, and uh I very much enjoyed that. It was a collective group activity.

Presenter6:40

But you you said that you also had a have an abiding memory of the terrible cold?

Anthony Storr6:44

Well, of course we didn't have central heating, and one got chill beds, and I mean it was extremely cold unless you were huddled over the fire. And it wasn't cold emotionally, it was just physically cold, and the rooms were very large.

Presenter6:58

And were there secret passages and

Anthony Storr7:00

Um well, yes, we said well, there was always a story that was a secret passage leading through to the headmaster's house next door, but I never verified this.

Presenter7:09

And what about the Abbey itself? Were you on intimate terms with that, too?

Anthony Storr7:12

Oh, very much so, yes, and uh quite early I was allowed.

Anthony Storr7:16

to have the keys and to go in when it had been closed and explore all over it. And I used to go up on the roof and all sorts of places by myself.

Presenter7:25

Weren't you frightened?

Anthony Storr7:26

No, not at all. No, I loved it. And uh

Anthony Storr7:30

I even used to go and play the gramphone at night in the organ loft, which the exact was great.

Presenter7:36

This was all by yourself. You were quite a solitary child.

Anthony Storr7:39

Well, I was over ten years the youngest, so I was virtually an only child, and in that way I was certainly very solitary. I think my parents did their very best to

Anthony Storr7:51

Find playmates for me.

Anthony Storr7:54

But there weren't any children living locally really, and uh I don't think I was too good at

Anthony Storr8:00

Getting on with the children they did try to introduce me to.

Presenter8:04

'Cause you were asthmatic. You you were

Anthony Storr8:05

And well, yes, I I had an awful lot of illness as a child, and I suppose that reinforced by

Anthony Storr8:12

lack of physical confidence and my isolation to some extent.

Presenter8:16

But it does all sound a little cheerless, nevertheless, your childhood, that it was.

Anthony Storr8:21

back on it as cheerless. I look back on it as

Anthony Storr8:25

Solitary but very happy when I was at home. But then, of course, uh things went wrong because my parents thought that for my health's sake.

Anthony Storr8:34

I ought to go away to school in the country, and this was a disaster. I mean, I was sent away when I was eight, and like so many people of my generation and so on, I was very miserable and and only really happy at home, and I didn't know how to adapt to other children and uh

Anthony Storr8:51

So I had a a tough time. But, you know, at home I was very happy and I didn't realize that I was very isolated. Um most of the time I didn't.

Presenter9:00

Let's pause there for your second record.

Anthony Storr9:03

Well, I won't.

Presenter9:04

Yeah.

Anthony Storr9:04

Play part of Brahms's violin concerto with Fritz Chrysler as the soloist. Chrysler was a great hero of mine.

Anthony Storr9:12

and I did in fact hear him play this in the Albert Hall.

Anthony Storr9:16

And what I remember about him was he was completely without any showing off of any kind. He was completely at ease and relaxed.

Anthony Storr9:26

And he played it as if he'd never played it before. I mean, he had this gift of making a work that he knew backwards sound completely spontaneous. And I think he was a wonderful player.

Presenter10:36

Part of Brahm's violin concerto in D Ocus seventy seven, played by Fritz Chrysler, with the Berlin State Opera Orchestra conducted by Leo Blech, and that was recorded in nineteen twenty seven.

Presenter10:48

So, Anthony Storr, from your prep school you were sent on to Winchester, where still apparently you felt rather isolated and unhappy. I'm sure you've analysed yourself many times uh since, but would you say that you're lucky to have emerged from what was obviously rather an unusual and and solitary background as as as rounded and balanced as you are?

Anthony Storr11:10

Well how do you know about rounding about? I don't think I am particularly. But no, I think I am very lucky. And I mean, there were many good things about Winchester. It wasn't the fault of the school that I wasn't very happy there to start with.

Presenter11:10

So how do you know about

Presenter11:23

But what of the what of the disadvantages that your um childhood and early life gave you? What what has happened in your life since or what kind of person are you that you mightn't otherwise have been because of this?

Anthony Storr11:37

Well, I think

Anthony Storr11:39

I felt out of it, and I felt that people didn't like me when I was young, and that I hadn't got any close friends or anything of that kind, so I developed various techniques of dealing with this.

Anthony Storr11:50

and one of them was becoming a good listener.

Anthony Storr11:54

and very early people started to confide in me.

Anthony Storr11:58

I mean, quite early at school, and so on.

Anthony Storr12:01

And because I developed this technique of, as it were, ingratiating myself with people, I think it it's one one thing that um drove me into psychiatry actually, because uh I discovered that this was a way of relating to people.

Presenter12:15

So you did it deliberately to to encourage that.

Anthony Storr12:17

I discovered it, you know, and and in fact I had more friends than I knew. I mean, by the time I left Winchester, I did have some friends.

Anthony Storr12:27

And um

Anthony Storr12:28

As I say, the last year of my time there I certainly did enjoy much more.

Presenter12:34

But you'd also been a very good listener to your mother, hadn't you, at one point, when she needed a shoulder?

Anthony Storr12:39

Well, um, I think our family does have a tendency toward depression, and I certainly do, and my mother certainly did. She used to blame herself quite wrongly for this. She thought she was being ungrateful and that sort of thing. But she certainly did have periods of depression when she was and I always used to know, because I was very close to her, and we used to talk about this very early on, and she always came out of them again, but I always knew when there was something wrong, and she couldn't explain what it was or what was wrong. My father wasn't at all like that. I mean, my father was a sanguine character who was very interested in philosophy. And I think although I'm no philosopher and can't compete with the highly intelligent philosophers at Oxford in intellectual rigour, nevertheless I've always been interested in what makes us tick in the philosophical aspects of psychology and that sort of thing. And so he made me into a thinker, I think, really.

Presenter13:46

But the fact remains that had you not had that kind of background you perhaps would never have um entertained the idea of going into psychiatry.

Anthony Storr13:54

I think that's probably true, yes.

Presenter13:57

Next piece of music.

Anthony Storr13:59

Well, I'd like to hear my dear friend Alfred Bundle, who I think is a great, great pianist.

Anthony Storr14:06

playing some of Beethoven's Diabelle variations because some

Anthony Storr14:11

A de belly variation seemed to me to

Anthony Storr14:13

comprise all of Beethoven, as it were, in one piece. I mean there's every aspect of Beethoven is reflected in this extraordinary work.

Presenter15:23

Alfred Brendel playing two of Beethoven's variations in C on a waltz by Anton Diabelli.

Presenter15:30

Cambridge was a turning point in your life, wasn't it? You went up to Christ's to study medicine, and you met CP Snow, who was appointed your tutor. Why do you think you and he hit it off so well?

Anthony Storr15:41

Well, I only really got to know him intimately by accident. Um it happened that in my second year my father died.

Anthony Storr15:49

He left no money, and in those days we didn't have grants and things and Snow was enormously supportive to me, and got some money out of the college for me, and then my father's friends clubbed together.

Anthony Storr16:01

and raised enough money to see me through my medical studies.

Anthony Storr16:05

But I owe him an enormous debt because he made me feel that uh

Anthony Storr16:10

I was a worthwhile person and that I could do well and so on. And when I tentatively suggested that I might uh do psychiatrists, now said, Oh, I think you'd be very good at it. Now nobody had ever said that they thought I'd be very good at anything, I think, before, so this was a great lift to my self-esteem. And your father said.

Presenter16:29

And your father said that too.

Anthony Storr16:31

No, I don't think so, really. I think I was a disappointment to my parents. I mean, I remember my mother saying, Well, we don't mind you not having got a scholarship to your public school. We do hope you'll get one at the university. And of course I never did, or it was no nowhere near it.

Speaker 216:44

There's no

Anthony Storr16:47

And I think um when I once started to write an autobiography which I've abandoned, I called it found wanting because I felt felt I'd always been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

Presenter16:59

But Snow must have been uh I mean, he was in loco parentis as your tutor. Uh no one presumably could have been more different from the sort of Victorian parent

Anthony Storr17:06

Absolutely not. He was like, I mean, the effect that.

Anthony Storr17:11

HG Wells and Bertrand Russell had an earlier generation. I mean, Snow was enormously life enhancing for me at that time, and and indeed we became very close friends, and I remained friendly with him until his death.

Presenter17:24

So here it was, as you said, who said that psychiatry was okay and you should and you could.

Anthony Storr17:28

A new short, a new cone.

Presenter17:30

But as I said in the beginning, it was considered really rather a a Cinderella in the medical profession at the time. Why was that?

Anthony Storr17:34

Medical profession at the time.

Anthony Storr17:37

Well, I think that we had those awful old mental hospitals round our necks with enormous wards and huge numbers of people, none of whom got enough attention. And there was an enormous gap between the sort of care of the chronic insane and treating neurotic patients. And indeed, most of the neurotic patients in my early days were treated by neurologists rather than psychiatrists. When I went to the Wardsley Hospital in 1947, this was, you know, a new departure, that there was an institute of psychiatry and a professor of psychiatry and so on. There had been one in Edinburgh, but there were very few chairs in psychiatry, so it wasn't considered academically respectable in the other in the way that other medical subjects were.

Presenter18:24

We we've come a long way since um the forties, though, in our attitudes to psychiatry, obviously, as you imply.

Anthony Storr18:27

That's in use.

Presenter18:30

But we haven't gone as far as the Americans. I mean, we haven't entered into the sort of therapy culture where it's very fashionable to be in analysis. I mean, it it certainly isn't fashionable. It's something that people don't often own up to and certainly wouldn't boast about, which the Americans might.

Anthony Storr18:45

No, that that's absolutely true. But I think actually people are coming round to this far more than they were, and certainly quite a lot of people will admit to having had treatment for attacks of depression or whatever it is. So I think a lot of that s stigma is disappearing. I'm very glad so.

Presenter19:04

But is it nevertheless perhaps a healthier attitude than the American one where, you know, maybe sometimes people go into analysis for its own sake?

Anthony Storr19:08

Yeah, no, I agree. I think it is. I think we're a little bit better balanced about it.

Presenter19:16

Record number four.

Anthony Storr19:18

Well, I want to play part of one of the Haydn string quartets. One of my friends in music was Hans Keller, and he tragically died a few years ago of Moisneuran disease, and the last thing he said to me was, You will go on listening to the Haydn quartets, won't you? He wrote a book about them.

Anthony Storr19:36

And I always have.

Presenter20:38

Part of Haydn's string quartet number three, opus seventy four, in G minor, played by the Codi Quartet.

Presenter20:45

How would you define the job of a psychoanalyst, Dr. Storr? Is it fundamentally to be a good listener?

Anthony Storr20:52

Well, you have to be tolerant and you have to have empathy, but at the same time you have to be able to be objective and detached. And it's that combination which is difficult. And it's that which I think requires that psychotherapists should be trained properly.

Anthony Storr21:09

I said and it was quoted the other day that I'd seen a lot of harm done by tea and sympathy. Now tea and sympathy is all very well, but I think you also have to have this very objective attitude and a lot of experience of the difficulties that human beings get into if you're really going to be prepared to help them.

Presenter21:28

So you have to be non-judgmental.

Anthony Storr21:30

You had to be non judgmental.

Presenter21:32

And you have to remain, you have to retain your own anonymity, if you like. You you mustn't say, Oh, yes, I remember when that happened to me and I felt, etc.

Anthony Storr21:36

And try it.

Anthony Storr21:40

No, I think that is always self-indulgent. I mean, bringing your own things into it i is not desirable. I mean, you've got in a sense to be like a mirror.

Anthony Storr21:49

You're reflecting the patient.

Anthony Storr21:52

Perhaps more truly as the patient really is than has happened before.

Anthony Storr21:58

And that throws the responsibility onto the patient. The patient has to learn how to help himself, as it were, through greater self-knowledge and understanding.

Presenter22:10

Except that the patient always thinks that he or she wants solutions from the doctor, from the professional.

Anthony Storr22:15

Well, I think people very soon learn that that isn't what psychotherapy is really about. I mean, that that it isn't about giving instructions as to how people ought to live. It's it's about

Anthony Storr22:28

increasing people's freedom of choice and freeing them, perhaps, from compulsions in the past which are affecting their conduct in ways that they hardly realize.

Presenter22:38

But I thought on occasions they started taking it all out on you, the the the transcription

Anthony Storr22:41

They can do it. They they can take it out on you, of course they can. And again, this can be very revealing because you'll usually find that this is a pattern which has gone on in their lives with other people who may account for why they are in trouble.

Presenter22:58

Record number five.

Anthony Storr23:00

Well, I want a piece of Barthog because I love Barthog. I think he's exciting and interesting and melancholy and a wonderful composer.

Speaker 223:46

Yeah.

Presenter24:09

The opening of Bartock's String Quartet No. 6, played by the Emerson String Quartet.

Presenter24:14

Does your childhood experience of solitude and and feelings of isolation mean that you would enjoy your Desert Island Doctor store, or does it mean you have a a horror of being too much alone?

Anthony Storr24:24

No, I like being alone. Uh I don't have a horror of it at all. I mean, obviously I'm I'm an ordinary human being. I l I want human companionship, but uh it doesn't fill me with the same horror that it does many people. So i it wouldn't be the first thing that I should be anxious about on a desert island by any means at all.

Presenter24:43

And you believe, like Gibbon, don't you, that solitude is the school of of genius? Um and you indeed you wrote a book about solitude. Do you think it is possible for a man or woman to be entirely happy alone on a desert island?

Anthony Storr24:57

No, I don't. I mean, men men and women are social beings and we all need human relationships. And would but people vary very much in how much they need human relationships at any one given time, and very I think vary very much in how much time they are used to spending alone or or what enjoyment they can find from it. I mean a lot of people have been brought up that if they went to read a book in their bedroom when they were a kid, their mother would come up and say, Why aren't you out playing with the others? as if there was something wrong in wanting to be alone some of the time.

Presenter25:33

But your your thesis in the book uh was, wasn't it, that that um beyond the reproductive age, as it were, we were actually rather better at being alone, that we turned to our outside interests and and could be entirely happy with them, whether it was music or

Anthony Storr25:39

Yeah.

Anthony Storr25:46

Well, I don't think entirely. I mean, I think everybody always needs human relationships and goes on doing so to the grave. But I certainly think that as people get older, they tend to turn to more impersonal interests. And I think this shows in the works of the great creators, in the works of the great composers, they become less.

Anthony Storr26:09

are concerned with communication more

Anthony Storr26:13

interested, if you like, in communion with their own soul or doing something very abstract and impersonal. I mean, I think of the changes that occurred in Beethoven's writing during the course of his life and so on. So I think that as you get older, probably your interest in other human beings declines to some extent.

Presenter26:35

Next piece of music.

Anthony Storr26:37

Well, the next piece of music is from De Bussy's piano music. I love De Bussy's piano music.

Anthony Storr26:43

And I chose this piece, Suare Don Granad, because it's part of De Busi's Spanish music, and uh we might talk about why that's of particular interest in a minute.

Presenter27:54

Ivan Moravet playing part of Dubus's Soire d'Ancrenade.

Anthony Storr27:58

You know, the interesting thing about that piece is that De Faya, amongst others, said that De Bussy had exactly caught the spirit of Spain in his Spanish music, so to speak.

Anthony Storr28:12

And yet Tibusi had never been to Spain, or he'd spent one day in San Sebastian, and that was the lot. So Spain was a country of the imagination to him. And I think with him and Ravel, had they known Spain better, they might have written less good Spanish music, which is a interesting reflection on how the imagination works.

Presenter28:33

You mentioned just now that the the great creators, such as Newton and Descartes, Pascal, Nietzsche.

Presenter28:39

All of whom were either celibate or didn't have close relationships. Now, what does that imply? Does that imply that creative endeavour is an alternative to human relationships?

Anthony Storr28:50

No, I don't think so. Uh it's simply that certain kinds of creativity seem to be rather uh go with solitariness. The great abstract thinkers, the great philosophers, seem to have mostly been people who lived alone or had didn't have close relationships over an extended period.

Anthony Storr29:11

And uh it makes

Presenter29:12

But which comes first? I mean, is it is is it would they not have succeeded in their chosen field of endeavour had they had a satisfactory relationship?

Anthony Storr29:21

Well, you could say that, you know, it's more difficult to concentrate if you're being interrupted by the patter of tiny feet all the time, isn't it? I mean, th th there's a simplistic explanation of this, but I think it's more than that. I think that

Anthony Storr29:34

There's probably reasons why people get passionately involved and interested in abstract conceptual thinking and um that that doesn't go with uh with close human relationships. But it certainly isn't true, I mean, of of other forms of creativity. Lots of uh musicians and writers and people have had lots of very close relationships and and so on.

Presenter29:58

It it's uh it's easy, though, to to bring to mind the kinds of names I just mentioned, much more difficult to bring to mind the name of a of a well balanced and rounded person whom we call genius.

Anthony Storr30:02

Too much.

Anthony Storr30:08

Well, I don't know. I mean, uh, Mozart is always supposed to have had some sort of tendency toward depression, but it's not very obvious. And Haydn was certainly extremely well adjusted. I mean, he had an unhappy marriage, poor Haydn, but he had a lot of other girlfriends, and he was a most sanguine and and uh I think very happy man a lot of the time.

Presenter30:28

But if you bring together a group of very creative people.

Presenter30:33

Are they more likely to have psychological disorders?

Anthony Storr30:38

I think it would be very, very difficult to be sure of that. There certainly is a connection between liability to manic depressive illness and creative writing.

Anthony Storr30:50

I mean, a great many poets have been manic depressives.

Anthony Storr30:54

And I actually did a lecture on this to the Royal Society of Literature and it is surprising the number of creative writers who've had extreme mood swings and who've been suicidal at times or have taken to drugs and alcohol and that kind of thing. But it's not a hard and fast rule by any means. I mean you can be a genius and be quite well adjusted.

Presenter31:20

Next piece of music.

Anthony Storr31:21

Well, the next piece, I want to hear Glen Gould, who I think is an incomparable Bach interpreter. I first got interested in him because hi one of his biographers wrote to me from Toronto and said would I read the manuscript that he was writing about this extremely odd man? And I said with delight that of course I would. And then I got interested in Glen Gould's playing, especially of Bach, and I would like to hear him play some of the Goldberg variations.

Presenter32:52

Glenn Gould playing two of Bach's Goldberg variations.

Presenter32:56

So your desert island, Antony Storr, presents you with no uh psychological problems. Solitude is your friend, and music is your physician. What about the practical aspects of it? I mean, would you find shelter? Would you find food?

Anthony Storr33:08

I'd be absolutely hopeless. I'm the worst person in the world. I mean, you'd have to put me on an island where the fruit dropped off the tree, really, because I'm absolutely useless with my hands at practical things like I mean, I did try to fish at one time, but I never caught any. And I think I'd be hopeless. It would I'd have to be uh have a endless supply of easily obtainable food.

Presenter33:36

But if you didn't have that, and if you couldn't build a shelter because you're impractical, you might ultimately face death. Now does that hold fear for you?

Anthony Storr33:43

Unlimited.

Anthony Storr33:46

No, it doesn't really, because I've been very near to death on several occasions. I nearly died when I was thirteen of septicemia. I cut my head open, it became infected, and this was before the days of antibiotics. And then I've had several in adult life, I've had several very near fatal attacks of asthma.

Anthony Storr34:06

I had one extraordinary attack where I was obviously very ill, and I suddenly had this extraordinary sense of calm come over me.

Anthony Storr34:16

and I was, as it were, poised above myself, looking down on my heaving body.

Anthony Storr34:22

and saying to myself, Oh, well, you know, it might go either way. And I'd never s I said to myself, Well, I've never seen an attack of asthma as bad as this, let alone have one.

Anthony Storr34:32

And when my doctor arrived he was far more agitated and anxious than I was. And so that rather removed the fear of death from me, because I think a beneficent Providence ensures that we shall become rather detached when we're dying and not

Anthony Storr34:48

be too anxious uh about the process.

Presenter34:52

Record number eight.

Anthony Storr34:54

Well, record number eight is Mozart's string quintet in G minor, which I think is one of the supreme works of music.

Presenter36:04

The opening of Mozart's string quintet number three in G minor, played by Arto Grummio, Arpad Geretz, George Janser, Max Lezure, and Evet Sarko.

Presenter36:14

So which one of the eight, if you could only take one, doctor Storr?

Anthony Storr36:18

Oh, it would be the last one, the the mote side.

Presenter36:21

And you'll b

Anthony Storr36:22

Boop.

Presenter36:22

Uh

Anthony Storr36:23

Well, I'd like to take Proust. I was introduced to Proust when I was an undergraduate by CP Snow, and I've always enjoyed reading it. It's a nice long book. So I would love to reread the whole of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. And your luxury.

Presenter36:38

Yeah.

Anthony Storr36:39

Oh, I think my luxury would have to be a piano. Maybe, if I had nothing else to do, I would finally master this bloody instrument with which I have wrestled all my life.

Presenter36:50

Doctor Anthony Stoll, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Anthony Storr36:54

Thank you.

Speaker 337:03

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.