Lord May

Speaker 10:00

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. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and two, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My castaway this week is a scientist. Like many of the cleverest in his field, he's a games player, most at home when he's pitting his wits against the challenges of the universe. Such a mighty contest doesn't permit specialisation. Theoretical physics, astrophysics, zoology, ecology, biology are just some, but not all, of the fields in which he's worked. Brought up by his mother in genteel poverty in a Sydney suburb, it was a teacher as so often who inspired the career he's enjoyed. It's taken him to all the best places, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, and for the last half of the nineties he was chief scientific adviser to the British Government. As the man who gave Tony Blair a crash course in GM crop technology, he understands the need to balance humanity with the avalanche of increasing knowledge. But he admits that the blending of passionate values and cold analysis does not come easily. Now the President of the Royal Society, he is Bob May, now Lord May indeed, people's peer. Which do you prefer, the the passionate values or the cold analysis, Bob?

Lord May1:35

I don't wish to make the choice. They're different things.

Lord May1:39

We need to ask with the potential that science opens to us, what are the doors we want to open and what are the doors we want to keep closed? What's the kind of tomorrow we want to build with the possibilities? That's about values and beliefs, and science has no special voice in the choices we should make.

Presenter1:56

Indeed. But when you became, as you did for as I say, the second half of the nineties, chief scientific advisor to the government, that was probably as as close as you came to being in touch with the public in all of this, where you come head up against that kind of passion. And I wonder if you found that difficult or uncomfortable, that you, the scientist, were

Lord May2:14

Well, maybe I should have, but I didn't. But I

Lord May2:17

do draw the clear distinction between my views about things, which I sometimes hold very strongly, as distinct from the cold analysis bit,

Lord May2:27

Which is

Lord May2:28

Whatever the debate, whether it's about embryonic stem cells or GM foods.

Lord May2:33

We should decide what we want to do, but it should be decided against as accurate as possible an understanding of

Presenter2:40

But in in a society where you have freedom of speech and a free press, you don't always get that. Do you mean you got extremely annoyed with the press on occasions, didn't you? You accused them of talking scientific rubbish and you didn't say rubbish.

Lord May2:49

You accuse them.

Lord May2:50

I said rude things. It's not quite the same as being extremely annoyed. I expressed my sometimes bewildered amusement in.

Lord May3:01

Fairly direct term.

Presenter3:03

But it is a culture clash to uh to that extent, isn't it, that that journalists and indeed politicians want straight answers, and scientists can't always give them.

Lord May3:13

I would like to think that the as chief scientist I always gave straight answers, but the straight answer is very often one doesn't know. The the notion that most people have of science from things like weakest link is a set of certainties. That's how we see science in a society.

Presenter3:28

That's what we require of it. Is what we require of you the extra.

Lord May3:30

How else do you organize a curriculum or set an exam? And much of science is like that. But the things that really trouble us are the things at or beyond the frontier, where we don't yet know.

Presenter3:41

Sure, but then what you want is is a sober, measured debate where the scientist and all his qualifications are heard, and that's not what you get in this kind of science.

Lord May3:50

This is true. This is true. And the bit that troubles me is that some of the actors coming to it with strong beliefs of a non scientific kind. Passionate values. Passionate values, which I approve of,

Presenter4:00

Passionate

Lord May4:05

will wish to bend the scientific facts to fit the values they hold.

Presenter4:10

Perhaps.

Speaker 44:10

Yeah.

Lord May4:10

I believe the values must have primacy.

Lord May4:14

No, I don't. Not always. Very rarely indeed. Only when I lose patience. And I respect the values because ultimately

Presenter4:15

But somebody can see.

Lord May4:22

In something like what we should allow and not allow in embryonic stem cell research, there are a background of facts, but people holding different values can honestly come to different decisions about what you want to do and not do, and I respect that as the judgment of society of how it wanted to use or not use this potential.

Presenter4:37

Yeah.

Presenter4:42

Understood. Tell me about your first record you're going to play on this desert island.

Lord May4:46

My first record is a reaffirmation of my essential Australianness, and it's by a chap called John Williamson, whom I think is a particularly interesting Australian, as it were, country Western singer, and it is just about what it means to be an Australian.

Speaker 45:01

I'm not asking you

Speaker 45:06

I drove alone.

Speaker 45:10

Can you bear the load?

Speaker 45:16

Will you tie it up with wire?

Speaker 45:20

Just to keep the show on the road Hey True Blue

Speaker 45:30

Hey True Blue.

Presenter5:31

John Williamson and True Blue, a nod towards Bob May, the Australian. He might have been absent for a what, a quarter of a century, but he knows where his roots are, yes?

Presenter5:41

It could be argued, I suppose, that now you're President of the Royal Society.

Presenter5:46

You couldn't be further away from those classless Australian roots. I mean, the society is is remote, it's hallowed, it's rarefied. What are you going to do about it?

Lord May5:56

Well, I'm not sure that's a good characterization of the Royal Society. The Royal Society is of course the curiously named really. It's it's it it's the United Kingdom National Academy of Sciences.

Presenter6:07

Mm-hmm.

Lord May6:07

But it's it's elitist. It's democratically elitist. It has all the egalitarianism of science and all the recognition that not all ideas are equal and not all people are as successful as practitioners. So it's elitist in the sense that based on performance, not on birth or location, it elects people.

Presenter6:31

Because they are are also i in the main, it has concentrated very much on the traditional sciences, hasn't it? There there's nobody in there, as far as I understand it, who is has made huge advances in new technology. You don't have to do that.

Lord May6:43

No, that's a misunderstanding, although there's a a germ of truth in it, but it's not in the constitution of the society, as it were. The society, if you go back to Victorian times, it would have had in it people, notably Faraday, Wedgwood, Armstrong, people who went all the way from the frontiers of science to its application in industry. And the society today still

Lord May7:09

Although the preponderance of the elections are people who have contributed to the creation of new knowledge, often in its most abstract form, it also recognizes in the form of applied and general candidates people who have translated that knowledge into

Lord May7:24

Useful things. Tim Berners-Lee, whom we elected, as the person who created the World Wide Web.

Presenter7:31

What about women? I mean, you've got twelve hundred fellows, fellows they call them, and forty-four of them are women. That's not um very balanced.

Lord May7:38

Yes, and it's actually worse than that in the sense that of not that I want to be ageist, but of fellows who live in the UK under the age of 65, there are something like 16 women out of something getting on for 400. If you look down to the next generation, I think the best way to start a career in science in any country in the world is the scheme that the Royal Society accidentally invented for young people, the university research fellows, who are given 10 years to do what they like, where they like, on their own terms. More than a third of those are women.

Presenter7:40

Adaptation

Lord May8:11

The problem is th simply that although we're doing well down in the younger age categories, it's going to take time for that to make its way through.

Presenter8:19

So in in a sentence, how do you want to leave your mark on the Royal Society?

Lord May8:23

I want to build on what was begun by my predecessors, and I want to carry us further back essentially the origins of the society, where it was much more broadly representative of science in society. I think in recent years there has been a slight tendency to drift toward recognizing pure science accomplishments, and that has to be the core of our values. But it needs to be wider in its recognition that that extends to popularizers of science, it extends to people who create applications. It is not simply publications in elite journals.

Presenter8:43

But it needs to be

Speaker 18:44

Now

Presenter8:57

So it ceases to be remote and rarefied.

Lord May8:59

Absolutely, absolutely.

Presenter9:02

Record number two.

Lord May9:03

Well against that background I turn back to Beyond My Own Birth to the song Carrick Fergus. This comes from a record of Lorena McInnett's. I choose this because this is the town my father moved from when he was about fourteen to move to Australia.

Speaker 49:22

I would transport her.

Speaker 49:26

But I'll sing no more now.

Speaker 49:31

Till I get a drink.

Speaker 49:35

I'm drunk today But then I'm seldom sober

Speaker 49:45

A handsome roll over.

Speaker 49:49

From town to town.

Presenter9:53

Carrick Fergus, sung by Cedric Smith and Lorena McKinnett. Memories of your father, Robert May, who was born in Ireland, went out to Australia, and met your mother, whose roots were Scottish, so you're a true Celt, Robert MacCready May. Your father was a disaster as far as the family was concerned, I gather.

Lord May10:10

I never knew my father well, and it's only recently that I've come to learn more of the family through his sister. She was a journalist, and she's written a long and fascinating narrative account of the family's early years in Carrig Fergus and then the move to Australia, which I think my father moving from middle class prosperity as a pharmacist's son in Carrick Fergus to a period of real struggle and

Lord May10:34

coming into a uh a new society.

Lord May10:38

Could not have been easy.

Presenter10:39

But he left you. He left you when you were a small boy.

Lord May10:40

He left you when you were small.

Lord May10:43

from devastating alcoholism. So I saw very little of him and my mother divorced him when I was quite young.

Presenter10:50

Hm. And you didn't see him.

Lord May10:51

Very rarely. I saw him very rarely and I didn't see him since the age of seventeen. It it's one of these things that uh it was a messy divorce, it was a painful thing and it it just seemed, as my brother once put it, dealing with one parent is hard enough. But I wouldn't have my childhood any different in retrospect on the grounds that on the whole I feel I've had such a lucky and privileged life, I wouldn't want to mess round with any of it unless I change the whole thing.

Presenter11:18

But you have said even after he'd gone that yours was a curious childhood. I wonder what you mean by that.

Lord May11:22

I wonder what you mean by that. I was also, I had asthma rather severely when I was young, and I missed a lot of school up to the age of about 13 or so. But I was the kind of child who spent a lot of time by itself, and I read voraciously. I have an extraordinary acquaintance with the ephemeral literature that goes back to the ephemeral literature of Annie Swan and people like that, of my grandmother, and then through sort of John Buchan and Bulldog Drummond and stuff like that from my mother's generation. And I inhabited a very rich world of the imagination.

Presenter11:56

So it was all teeming away inside, but you were the sort of solitary, sickly little boy sitting in bed.

Lord May12:01

Yeah, f when I was little. I g I I grew out of it.

Presenter12:04

As we shall hear, tell me about your third record.

Lord May12:06

Yeah.

Lord May12:06

Well the third record is in a sense a leap ahead to a year I spent at um King's College in nineteen seventy six, and it's partly for that reason that I chose the choir of King's College singing part of the sanctus from Foray's Requiem.

Speaker 412:37

So much change.

Speaker 413:04

I should love

Presenter13:22

End of the Sanctus from Foray's Requiem, sung by the choir of King's College, Cambridge, with the new Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Sir David Wilcox. Tell me about the school teacher who inspired you, Bob. Who was he? How did he do it?

Lord May13:35

I had a succession of excellent teachers, but one particularly inspiring person, a chemist, named Lenny Basser. He had through his hands seven fellows of the Royal Society, one Nobel laureate, three members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He also coached the track team, which won the state high schools championship, and there are several hundred state high schools, 28 of the 31 years he coached it. What an extraordinary man. He had...

Presenter14:01

What a marriage?

Speaker 414:01

Henry May

Speaker 114:02

Uh

Speaker 414:02

Yes.

Lord May14:04

a kind of creative laziness in a way. For example, he didn't like uh marking exam papers, so he did this brilliant thing. The exam papers were handed back to the class and we marked each other's papers, which if you think about it, is a brilliant, if somewhat uh occasionally abrasive pedagogic device.

Presenter14:20

You went on being lucky, though, didn't you, with your teachers and mentors as you went on using

Lord May14:23

I have been extraordinarily lucky. I went to university to study engineering, but I got lured sideways into physics. My thesis committee were three people whose own thesis supervisors had been three of the giants of the early days of theoretical physics, Wolfgang Pauli, Rudy Piles, and Vicki Weisskopf. They were my intellectual grandfathers, as it were, and my thesis committee projected the air that you could start a new whole area like solid state physics on a wet weekend, as it were. That the job of a theoretical physicist was

Speaker 114:48

With remote.

Lord May14:58

a kind of wonderful arrogance that you could take any problem

Lord May15:03

and think what are the essential simplicities, and go off, regardless of specialization.

Presenter15:08

Which was right up your street, because it was exactly.

Lord May15:10

You are a polymath. Well, I wouldn't say I'm a polymath. It is simply a set of skills, it's a style that suits me.

Presenter15:18

You've also said you realize that life could be hugely enjoyable because you could spend the rest of your life doing the equivalent of what you also enjoy doing, which is playing snooker and chess.

Lord May15:26

Playing games with nature where the rules of the game are to try and work out what the rules are.

Presenter15:32

Record number four.

Lord May15:33

Yes, my fourth record again goes back to earlier years of my life. It's Pete Seeger singing the Bells of Rimney. I did not grow up with music, and music more came into my life when I met my wife as a postdoc at Harvard. And she, in particular, had been, when younger, a counsellor in summer camps where Pete Seeger used to come. And I have always had great affection for him for all those associations. And I particularly like him on the 12-string guitar.

Speaker 416:07

Is there hope for the future? Say the brown bells of murky.

Speaker 416:15

Who made the mine owners say the black bells of Ronda?

Speaker 416:22

Men who rock the minor To stay the grim elves of Lina.

Presenter16:35

Pink Seeger singing the bells of Rhumney, or Rimney, as he calls them. Um Bob May, yours has by no means been a a a straight line from this polymathic student we were describing to the top of the scientific tree. There's been a lot of chance along the way there, so uh whatever the mysteries of life science can explain, it can't explain serendipity, can it? Or can it?

Lord May16:55

No, it can't, and never can.

Presenter16:57

But isn't isn't chaos theory, which is my way of getting us on to this complicated subject, which has occupied so much of your professional life, you know, a reaffirmation that there is always a mystery, that that as fast as you learn the rules that appear to govern the world around us, they generate conditions which confound those rules, and something quite different and unpredictable happens?

Lord May17:17

Yes, but it's much more than that. Uh chaos theory doesn't tell us what you just said, because we always knew that. Uh the world is complicated and that makes it unpredictable. What chaos says is the simplest rules you can imagine.

Lord May17:32

really, really simple things can actually

Lord May17:36

sometimes behave in a manner that is as complicated and as unpredictable as anything you can imagine.

Lord May17:42

The dream that Newton bequeathed to us.

Lord May17:46

Is a dream that we live in a world that's governed by rules?

Lord May17:50

And if the rules are simple enough.

Lord May17:53

motions of the planets round the sun, we can make predictive statements.

Lord May17:58

And the things we can't predict are because they're very complicated. As my friend Martin Rees has once very tellingly put it, we could predict a century ahead the eclipse that many of us saw, but we couldn't predict the day before whether we'd actually be able to see the eclipse because we can't predict the cloud structure.

Lord May18:18

It says there are situations and local weather prediction is one of them. When I was young, we thought the problem was just computational power, more and more computers, better and better satellite information will push prediction further and further ahead. Not true.

Presenter18:32

Does that mean we will then never know? Does that or that it just takes us longer to work it out?

Lord May18:35

Is that or that it just takes us?

Lord May18:37

No, it means in principle predictability beyond about ten to twenty days of local weather will probably always be impossible because the system is so sensitive

Lord May18:50

to the conditions of the moment that in the poetic terms the flapping of a butterfly's wings can carry you

Lord May18:57

ten or twenty days out to a different end point.

Presenter18:59

Did you explain all this to the Prime Minister?

Lord May19:02

That's not one of the things I had a conversation with either John Major or Tony Blair about, but I do assure you I've explained it to many people and I've tried to explain to them that chaos as depicted, for example, in Jurassic Park is not chaos. I mean there you had this character running around telling everybody that chaos said the world was complicated and things would go wrong, which you didn't need chaos to do that and I couldn't wait till the dinosaur ate him.

Presenter19:27

You did, I have to say, explain Fairman's last theorem to the Queen.

Lord May19:31

I didn't and in fact, very nicely. I had written a note, as was my habit, suggesting when Andrew Wiles got a special recognition for it, he couldn't get the Fields Medal because the Fields Medal is ageist, you can't get it if you're over forty. And I got back a l a really nice letter from Balmoral saying uh they had all been fascinated in this person who had

Lord May19:52

The theorem had been round since the sixteen hundreds. They'd looked it up in the encyclopedia, and it wasn't very enlightening. Could I explain? And so I gave two sides of A4. One side tried to explain what the theorem did, and the second page tried to say why it was interesting, why it wasn't just a piece of mathematician sewing I'm cleverer than you.

Presenter20:10

And did you get a reaction?

Lord May20:11

I got a a very nice reaction when I did next see the Queen, and she said that they had read it with interest and didn't guarantee they understood it. And in what I hope was pardonable Les Majesty, I said there would not be a quiz.

Presenter20:28

Next piece of music.

Lord May20:29

My next piece of music again goes back to my wife in that in Judy's house music was always playing and almost always Mozart. Her father was immensely fond of it. My own C D of this is one that I inherited from her father. It's Mozart's string quartet in B flat major.

Presenter21:51

The opening of the last movement of Mozart's string quartet in B flat major, played by the Smettener Quartet.

Presenter21:57

Um you it was, Bob May, who predicted back in the mid eighties that uh AIDS would ravage the African continent. People accused you of scaremongering other experts. They didn't like it, did they? But you were right.

Lord May22:09

Well it was myself and a colleague Roy Anderson who published the first prediction of the likely demographic consequences of HIV and AIDS for Africa. And we were criticized by the World Health Organization and the Population Council who shortly after had also produced mathematical models with more optimistic outcomes. And there's a interesting general point that emerges.

Lord May22:32

When you're well behind the frontiers of science and you understand it, then.

Lord May22:38

Any trained person can lift the stuff off the shelf and do a good job. Most of the advice to government is like that, and you you the the

Lord May22:48

Routine, well-trained, good people are probably better than Nobel laureates because they won't get bored.

Lord May22:54

When you're at or beyond the frontier, you really have to get the people who are used to, as it were, climbing the clean rock, not using ladders and cables to help them.

Lord May23:07

And what happened for the WHO people and the World Population Council people rather sensibly used standard epidemiological models, which for various technical reasons didn't fit the transmission of HIV, whereas Roy and I turned to ask what facts are there, and we produced models that were less mathematically elegant.

Lord May23:29

But more in accord with the facts, and for that reason, were more gloomy in their predictions.

Presenter23:35

But ultimately more accurate.

Lord May23:36

And I wish we'd been wrong.

Presenter23:38

Hmm.

Lord May23:38

Hmm. I wish we'd been wrong.

Presenter23:40

Next piece of music.

Lord May23:42

My next piece of music, again, is in a sense one of the cusps of my life. It's Bob Dylan's Blowing in the Wind.

Lord May23:50

which is, I think, one of the canonical statement of the spirit of the sixties and it was my own entrainment toward the end of that time, sixty nine, seventy, in the founding of the Movement for Social Responsibility and Science in Australia that quite accidentally led to me as a physicist getting interested in ecological and environmental questions.

Speaker 424:09

How many seas must the white dove sail?

Speaker 424:14

Before she sleeps in the sand

Speaker 424:19

Guysn't how many times must the cannon balls fly?

Speaker 424:25

The four therefore band.

Speaker 424:30

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.

Presenter24:36

The answer is a blowin' in the wind.

Presenter24:39

Bob Dylan and Blowing in the Wind. There are so many areas, Bob May, that one could ask you for a quick straight answer on. Let me throw some of them at you. What about the food we eat?

Presenter24:48

Factory farming means our chickens have a high incidence of salmonella and there's they're given growth hormones that lice breeds among factory farmed salmon. Do you worry about that? Do you eat these things? Should we?

Lord May25:00

Well, interestingly, when our daughter was young, she was not passionately vegetarian, and we drifted to a semi vegetarian sort of diet.

Lord May25:09

Fact is, by and large, in our household we do eat birds and fish, but not mammals.

Presenter25:14

So you do eat factory fire? You don't look for free-range eggs, free-range chickens.

Lord May25:18

No, not in general.

Presenter25:19

But isn't the truth that that that organic agriculture as a whole is better for us in inverted commas, but it's morally indefensible because we can't feed the world that way?

Lord May25:31

Well, I I would put it right round the other way. I'd say there isn't as to my understanding is that it is doesn't offer any additional nutritional or health benefits.

Lord May25:42

But what it does offer is a more friendly attitude to the environment than most f forms of farming, and therefore there's an ethical benefit but not a health benefit.

Presenter25:52

But you're I think, although a lot of the things you've said when you were scientific adviser about GM crops seem to be contradictory, I never quite got to the bottom of it, but it it seemed to me that you are in favour of GM crops because you know that's how you can feed the world and organically you can't

Lord May26:09

I have a a taxonomy of concerns and worries about GM Foods, which is threefold.

Lord May26:17

Food safety, I don't think there are any risks that aren't there in any novel food stuff.

Lord May26:23

Environmental worries of things like producing superweeds. Well, we always have to worry about alien invaders and we have things in a ranunculus in the Norfolk Broads, rhododendrons around the coast path. They all come from garden centres, and there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest GM crops pose any risks that ordinary conventional crops don't pose. Then there's a third category of worries where I worry a lot. After all, the legitimate aim of farming is to grow food that no one but us eats. We don't share with weeds, which are just plants in the wrong place, or with pests, which are just insects with the wrong appetites. And the more we get toward realising the ideal of growing food that no one eats but us, then the more silent will be the spring. I wish us to move to ask how we use this new way of producing crops, which is what we've been doing all through our history since the dawn of agriculture, in ways which give us a greener agriculture, a doubly green revolution, a revolution which makes us yet more effective because we're going to have to do that to feed tomorrow's population. We couldn't feed today's world with yesterday's agriculture and we won't be able to feed tomorrow's world with today's, but to do it in a way that is more environmentally sensitive, producing crops that are water tolerant, salt tolerant, resistant to particular insects while not putting stuff on them that kills all sorts of other things. In short, shaping the agriculture to its environment rather than wrenching the environment to the agriculture with fossil fuel energy subsidized things.

Presenter27:59

Now this is the tutorial you gave to Tony Blair.

Lord May28:02

Yes, yes, it was a very apt pupil he was.

Presenter28:07

Record number seven.

Lord May28:09

It's a Schubert Leder based on one of Heine's poems, Der Atlas, Atlas carrying the burdens of the world, with the baritone sung by Ralph Cohn. It has a sentimental association in that Ralph Cohn is a friend and he's a benefactor at the Royal Society, and he's the person who generously put up the funds for the Royal Society's enterprise on science and society.

Speaker 429:06

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 429:08

German Atre Gricus unpreceved.

Speaker 429:23

Tuschwalt ses, touch this Jauge Wolt.

Presenter29:30

Schubert's Der Atlas, sung by Ralph Cohn, accompanied by Graham Johnson. So you'll sit on your desert island, Bob, and and and wrestle with the problems you wrestle with at the moment, really. I mean, nothing much will change, really?

Lord May29:43

I don't know about that. I'd be really upset being on the desert island, I think.

Presenter29:47

What will you miss most? Family apart, of course. I wonder what would you miss most about your life to day?

Lord May29:53

I would miss uh my friends and colleagues. I would miss the cut and thrust of sort of daily activity, whether it's uh the science itself or whether it's the science more in a social context. And I would miss the games I play, and I would miss uh tennis.

Presenter30:09

Snooker

Lord May30:09

Bridge. Don't play snooker anymore, which is what I spent uh much of my undergraduate days doing. It was the one subject I studied really devotedly. And I haven't played uh although when younger I played chess and bridge both at the national level, I haven't played for many years. I bridge I act contract bridge is the only training I ever had for administration and management, and brilliant training it is if you think about it. You have a partner.

Lord May30:35

You have to make decisions under uncertainty.

Lord May30:39

And very often you make the right decision brilliantly, but the opposing cards lie in an improbable way so that you get a disastrous result, and you have to cheerfully forget it and go without any disturbance on to the next hand. It's a perfect model for the civil service.

Lord May30:57

Last record.

Lord May30:58

My last record is the prelude to Wagner's Parsifaul. I chose that partly because I like the opera and partly because I like the theme of the holy fool that runs through it.

Presenter32:12

End of the Prelude to Wagner's Parsifoul, played by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Sir George Schulte. Now, if you could only take one of those eight records, Bob, which one would you take?

Lord May32:22

Well, actually I'd I'd take a parcifile, although I would be wanting to take the whole opera.

Presenter32:27

I see. Well, we won't comment on that. What about your book? You've got the Bible, you've got the complete works of Shakespeare waiting for you.

Lord May32:33

I'm going to take a curious book which is going to go with the the other object. I'm going to take the book that my brother gave me for my twenty first birthday, which is uh Capablanca's Best Hundred Games in Chess. And I could keep myself cheerfully employed for the better part of a year working through that and

Presenter32:49

Hence your luxuries.

Lord May32:51

And my luxury is I was going to uh take from the British Museum the Isle of Lewis chess set with those wonderful old things that were found on a

Lord May33:01

Back of a cave, that would be my chessboard.

Presenter33:05

Wonderful. Robert May, Lord May, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Speaker 133:17

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