David Starkey

Speaker 20:00

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 20:08

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

Presenter0:28

My Costaway this week is a historian. Clever, articulate, and good at popular performance, he spent the last few years bringing to life on television some of England's more interesting kings and queens. He graduated to the small screen from radio, where his performance on The Moral Maze earned him the title of rudest man in Britain from the Daily Mail.

Presenter0:48

An only child from a working class background in Kendal in Cumbria, he won a scholarship to Cambridge, a first class degree, and the life of a distinguished academic at the LSE.

Presenter0:59

Lured into writing for newspapers on the constitutional matters surrounding the royal family, he moved naturally and authoritatively into television. The rest well, all of it actually, is history. I treat conversation as a boxing match, he says. When you write, you write the truth, but you talk to win. He is David Starkey. To be fair, you've attributed that quote. It it it is Samuel Johnson, isn't it, David?

David Starkey1:23

It is indeed Sue. The last thing that I would try to do was usurp the great Panjandaram himself. It would be very foolish.

Presenter1:30

But the point is that that there are at least two David Starkeys, the the talking one and the writing one, isn't there? And that's the point, that that the one flies off without restraint and the other you know

David Starkey1:41

Well, Michael Burke said that anyway.

Speaker 31:42

Yeah.

David Starkey1:42

Yeah.

Presenter1:43

But the other one wants to get it absolutely right. What is it that makes the difference?

David Starkey1:48

Talk is quick, is light flowing. It's there essentially to express the word that comes to you. Writing is quite different. Writing is the word that comes and then is rejected and is thought about and tried again. It's the ultimate vanity of the author.

Presenter2:03

It's the ultimate.

Presenter2:05

But it's also the ultimate vanity of the performer, isn't it? Because you're turned on by performance. It's a drug, isn't it? You you know, one's heard you're going for the kill. You love making mincemeat of people.

David Starkey2:15

There is a certain smell of blood, that's quite true. And I'm afraid when I got going on some of my rants on the moral maze, because that's what they were, I was uncontrollable for the very simple reason. It's a kind of adrenaline driven drug. You know you c I came out of the studio literally high, as poor old Michael will testify.

Presenter2:18

Ooh.

Presenter2:33

Well, absolutely. I mean, we should remind people, in case people never heard you, uh we won't say who, but you reduced a a a leading man of the church. Well, you made mincemeat of him, didn't you? You said he made you want to vomit in his in his what was it? His fatness, his smugness and his pomposity.

David Starkey2:47

Poor man, it's George Austin, the venerable George Austin, the the ex-archdeacon of York. And you know, we become quite good friends subsequently, but he was he was very tiresome in studio. And it was he who actually coined the phrase the rudest man in Britain, which was then picked up by the Daily Mail, and instantly the phone started ringing. Real friends, and especially false friends, saying, Oh, we're so sorry, you know, how awful, we know you're not like that. And my repost was, Don't worry, it's worth at least a hundred thousand a year.

Presenter3:17

And indeed it's proved true.

David Starkey3:19

Well, it's proved a bad underestimate.

Presenter3:24

But then, of course, there is the benign incarnation of David Saki, the one who.

Presenter3:31

Absolutely adores these performances on camera on the television, these lengthy pieces to camera. You love it, don't you?

David Starkey3:38

Yes, I do. But there's another David Starkey, too, which in a sense underlies both of the ones we've been talking about. Professionally, for thirty five years I was a teacher. I stopped teaching professionally and then started on television. But the techniques are the same, the discipline's greater.

Presenter3:54

Mm-hmm.

Presenter3:56

But to that extent it's a job made for you. It's as if you were born to actually how far shall we go with this, David? Were you born to do this job?

David Starkey4:04

Well, let let's have Shakespeare. We've had Johnson, you know s some are born great, some achieve greatness, some have it thrust upon'em. My career's got all those three elements in. And above all, the thing that made my career was the way my school functioned. We have this wonderful thing, terrifying thing, the stump speech.

David Starkey4:23

Whole school hall filled with bored boys, and one by one you were summoned, and I can still see it. There were five steps. You got to the top of the steps, and there was the English master with a sadistic grin, and he handed you a little slip of paper, and you'd no more time than it took you to walk from the edge of the stage to the centre of the stage to prepare your speech and to start speaking as a junior two minutes. Middle school, three, senior, four, and extra points if you went beyond. And I always won.

David Starkey5:00

The one the one moment in my entire school career that I was popular.

Presenter5:06

Tell me about your first record.

David Starkey5:07

My first record is Henry VIII's pastime with good company. He.

David Starkey5:13

is a perpetually inexhaustible subject. He is the central king in English history. He is the fulcrum round which our world revolves. Why we're debating at the moment our relations with Europe, more than anybody else, it's Henry. He literally is as important now as he was when he sat on the throne.

Speaker 35:38

Other shall until I die, grown to last, but not denied. So God be pleased, the same will I. For my first hands and sing and dance, my whole heart is set, For Godly sport, for my comfort, Who shall me let?

Speaker 36:17

For idolats, this chief mistress, For five says all, There's who can say, But mother and play, For there is no more.

Presenter6:32

Henry VIII's composition Pastime with Good Company sung by Glenda Simpson with the Camerata of London directed by Barry Mason. Your telling of history on television, David Starkey, owes a lot, you'd be the first to admit, I think, to popular drama, soap even. Jousting was the sixteenth-century football, you said Thomas Cromwell was the Alastair Campbell of his day. Your your academic colleagues must think you've sold your soul.

David Starkey6:56

Some do, some don't. I think some of them will recognise, or at least I hope they will, that underneath, you know, the verbal cleverness, the contemporary references, there's something Sue I hate I'm being really boring on this there's there's a bit of seriousness, there is scholarship every single thing that I say is underpinned by evidence.

Presenter7:17

But it must beat academe by a long chalk.

David Starkey7:19

It's more fun. Um one of the things I discovered about television, to my surprise and pleasure, was that I enjoyed working with people. Sometimes it's maddening, of course. The worst filming I've ever did in my life was at Windsor Castle. What with the combination of tourists, the guards, a band, and

David Starkey7:39

He throw How the Queen lives in that place I do not know you are directly under the flight bars

Presenter7:46

Under the flight.

David Starkey7:48

Absolutely.

Presenter7:50

But I mean, as I say, beats academe by a long chalk, which you've said and you you resigned, I think, in nineteen ninety eight from the LSE, actually when this career took off. But you had said it had become deeply unpleasant. How had it become unpleasant?

Speaker 37:58

Uh

David Starkey7:58

Yeah.

David Starkey8:04

Academic life has got a dangerously self-destructive quality about it. You have all these immensely intelligent people, badly underpaid and much of the time rather seriously underemployed, all exercising their talents upon, or I should say not so much talents as talons on each other. A dear friend of mine, Kevin Sharp, says that the collective noun for a group of historians should be a malice of historians, a pride of lions, the malice of historians. And I got sick of it.

Presenter8:34

The malice of historian.

David Starkey8:49

It is a source of pride. Um it's also

David Starkey8:53

At the risk of sounding a bit new labour, rather humbling, in a sense.

David Starkey8:58

How easy it is

David Starkey9:00

to make what I do, how difficult it was for him to make the little that he did. And it's it is a testimony, also, I think, Sue, to the extraordinary social mobility of Britain.

Presenter9:15

Record number two.

David Starkey9:16

This is the magnificent dead march from Purcell's music for the funeral of Queen Mary, and I first heard it played in the extraordinary huge spaces, five aisles wide, of Kendall Parish Church, where those trombones echoed like the last trumpet.

Presenter10:34

The march from Purcell's Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary.

Presenter10:38

Take me back now then for a moment, David, to Kendall, um to the Kendall of your childhood, what just at the end of the war. Um tell me where and how you lived.

David Starkey10:49

I was literally born in January of'forty five, so just V Day was just round the corner, in other words, victory in Europe. Um and my mother describes me sleeping all through the celebrations in my pram. It must be the only time in my life that I've ignored a party, but still.

David Starkey11:06

We were born in a little council house. It had a through-living room.

David Starkey11:11

a kitchen in which there was the only sink in the house there was a bathroom downstairs, and a main bedroom upstairs the small bedroom at the front, where I was, and the l slightly larger bedroom at the back, which was my grandfather's.

Presenter11:28

And your your father worked in the local washing machine factory.

David Starkey11:31

Uh That's right. My father began as a turner and graduated to being a works foreman.

Presenter11:36

And your mother scrubbed floors for a living.

David Starkey11:38

Eventually, eventually not all the time, there were periodic crises in the family finances. There was never more than a shilling or two a week left, and sometimes less. And when, as it were, you got into the Macauber situation of there being nothing left at all, she went out and she scrubbed floors.

Presenter11:56

And you were an only child, and a much longed for only child. You've taken a long time to come.

David Starkey12:00

I'd taken a long time, um I think about ten years.

Presenter12:03

And you were born with problems. You were really quite severely disabled.

David Starkey12:06

I had

David Starkey12:08

Two club feet in other words, the feet were reversed, they pointed backwards. I had also suffered, as so many children born at that period did, from the terrible blight of polio.

Presenter12:18

So you spent a long time in hospitals. Where they weren't at all then sympathetic to children. You're probably on an adult ward and so on.

David Starkey12:20

Yeah.

David Starkey12:24

Oh, it was it they are some of one's grimmest memories. I remember waking up after the operation. First there's a sense of pain it's a nightmare. Then you see the cave.

David Starkey12:38

Over your leg.

David Starkey12:40

And then distant towards the end of the ward, because it was the middle of the night, all you saw was a bare light bulb, and the night sister on duty, and as I whimpered, she came over and told me to be quiet, because I was disturbing the other patients.

Presenter12:53

Spammer blade.

Presenter12:57

But there was one nursing sister, wasn't there, who gave you some particularly individual attention to make it possible for you to walk?

David Starkey13:03

Boom!

David Starkey13:05

Yes, it was Sister Middleton, and she devised a special boot so that I could walk. She got a car tyre.

David Starkey13:13

and made a kind of lace-up.

David Starkey13:15

which enabled me to hobble around, and she was wonderful, bright, and clever, and funny.

Presenter13:21

And she was one of many important women in your life, as we shall hear.

David Starkey13:23

Om has

David Starkey13:24

Absolutely, yeah.

Presenter13:26

This pool

David Starkey13:26

Strong women. Strong women.

Presenter13:28

Strong women, that's what you hand, maybe. Here we are. Record number three.

David Starkey13:32

Well

Presenter13:32

Yeah.

David Starkey13:32

Uh

Presenter13:32

This is the great

David Starkey13:33

Duet from Verdi's Don Carlos, where there are, I'm afraid, Sue, absolutely no women at all. It's a male duet between Don Carlos and his friend Rodrigo, and in my wicked days on the London scene, which my mother so disapproved of, we used to refer to this as the gay national anthem. Let it ring.

Speaker 313:54

We are

Speaker 313:59

Anybody else?

Speaker 314:24

All the waters here is

Presenter14:52

The great friendship duet God who has filled our hearts from Verdi's Don Carlos with Placido Domingo and Sheryl Milnes, with the Ambrosian Opera Chorus and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House Coven Garden, conducted by Carlo Maria Giolini.

Presenter15:04

So, David Stargey, tell me about the the strongest woman of all in your life, uh your your mother

David Starkey15:09

Not Margaret Thatcher, but my mother.

Presenter15:10

My mother hits me.

David Starkey15:16

Yeah. Yes, she also loved. I think it's important to understand.

David Starkey15:20

Pygmalion is also a love story.

David Starkey15:22

She'd waited a long time for me. She knew she would never have another child. She was desperately worried that I had been born disabled. She was also protecting me from the fact they were poor. They went without. I didn't.

Presenter15:36

But in the end you were stifled by mother obviously.

David Starkey15:38

Yes, because it does become cloying. I mean, I have the most idyllic memories of childhood. Then you begin the process of separation and becoming your own person, which, you know, begins with rebellion, turns into dishonesty, awful dishonesty, and finally culminates in something like dislike.

Presenter15:58

Really? She didn't let go easily then.

David Starkey16:00

She never let go.

David Starkey16:02

ever, ever let go. She went mad in the struggle not to let go.

Presenter16:08

But not only did you hurt her because you obviously and quite understandably insisted on moving away from her, but also you did things of which she deeply disapproved.

David Starkey16:16

Like being gay.

David Starkey16:18

Again, it's one can look back and in some ways wish one had done it differently. There was a kind of cult of coming out as an essential part of reconciling yourself to being gay, which I think it probably is. But of course

David Starkey16:32

You do it in a way which is wilfully hurtful.

David Starkey16:35

to parents.

David Starkey16:37

It was unmentionable.

Presenter16:39

Oh, it would have been awful.

David Starkey16:40

It was a crime. It was a crime. She was also religious and puritanical. So there were all kinds of of mingled taboos, guilts, possessiveness.

Presenter16:52

Cool.

David Starkey16:52

Yeah.

Presenter16:52

But did you did you ever go back to that?

David Starkey16:53

Did you ever go back? Oh, yes, we we never not we never not spoke.

Presenter16:57

No, but did you really heal the breeze?

David Starkey16:59

Did you

Presenter16:59

Talk about all of these things.

David Starkey17:00

Absolutely not. You couldn't. She couldn't. She couldn't. And I was probably unwilling at that.

David Starkey17:06

You're very hard when you're young.

David Starkey17:08

That's why you can do all these brutal things. As you get older, you get more soppy-minded soon.

Presenter17:15

I don't think anyone would call you soppy minded. Oh, I have a soppy streak.

David Starkey17:18

Oh, I have a soft history.

Presenter17:20

Come on, brick on number four.

David Starkey17:22

Well, uh this this leads directly really to this. It's Pavana La Battalia, and it is the first record that I and my partner bought together. So this is, oh God, our tune.

Presenter18:22

Pavana la Battalia, a sixteenth century Italian carnival song performed by the New London Consort conducted by Philip Pickett.

Presenter18:29

Was it always history then, David, that that captured your imagination more than any other subject? I mean, what were the triggers? What informed your imagination?

David Starkey18:36

History was important, but it wasn't the only thing. Oddly enough, when I was in the fifth form, I was better as a scientist. But I was no good at maths. The only math sou that I can handle is my bank statement, which I am really quite good. But unless figures have got pound signs in front of them, I'm hopeless. And I think if you're to be a scientist, you've to be good with number. I was good with words, and I knew it. But I was also very lucky with the sort of books that were around. We were very, although it was a working-class household, it was a very bookish household. What sort of books? My first important memory is of the wonderful Arthur Meese Children's Encyclopedia. It was magical. The other key influence on me, though, was a book, or rather four books, that have remained with me.

Speaker 218:52

Really quite proud of it.

Speaker 218:54

Because of

Speaker 319:11

Duck.

Speaker 219:11

Mm. Yeah.

Speaker 319:11

Yeah.

David Starkey19:27

It's the Quennels, a history of everyday things in England, and it was history told through objects.

Speaker 219:31

And the

David Starkey19:35

So costume, buildings, furniture, they are magical. This recreated this for me.

Presenter19:40

The f

David Starkey19:43

Made history real.

Presenter19:44

Real. So to Cambridge, where you um eventually came into the orbit, reading history, of GR Elton, the Tudor scholar. H his career was really taking off then, wasn't it? And he took a shine to you. How would you characterize your relationship with him at that point?

David Starkey20:01

At that point, very good. And well he

Presenter20:04

He really thought you were quite something, didn't he?

David Starkey20:06

He did, I suppose. I think it was John Morrill describing Elton and me. And John characterized the relationship between myself and Elton. Oh, well, he was Lucifer. And you will remember, Lucifer is the beloved angel who turns into the devil and falls. But we're still dealing in the days when I was in the the orbit of heaven and was a good boy.

Presenter20:24

And falls.

Presenter20:29

We'll talk about your great dispute with her in a minute, but this is another example, if you like, isn't it, of you ultimately.

Presenter20:37

Turning against your mentor as you, if you like, turned against your mother, yeah.

David Starkey20:41

I think that's absolutely right. And my eventual dispute with Geoffrey was in one sense, I suppose, like the breach with my mother. It was becoming my own man. Geoffrey was suffocating.

Speaker 320:52

Mm-hmm.

David Starkey20:55

My own father was a sweet, gentle man, but not a huge influence in my life. Geoffrey was, in a sense, the kind of domineering father that I had never had, and, I suppose, had to break from, in exactly the way that I broke from my mother.

Presenter21:12

Next piece of music.

David Starkey21:13

It's the Mozart's quartet for Ober and Strings, which I first heard just before I went to Cambridge in the grounds of the Archbishop's Palace at Tours, an eighteenth century building, an eighteenth century garden, a summer's evening, and this music wafting through the scents of the Loire Valley.

Presenter22:30

Part of the adagio of Mozart's quartet for oboe and strings in F major, played by Lotar Koch with the Amadeus Quartet.

Presenter22:38

So, David Starkey, this major academic falling out between you and G. R. Elton, I mean, give me the essence of it. What was the fundamental disagreement?

David Starkey22:47

The fundamental disagreement was how people work.

David Starkey22:52

Geoffery believed that government, Tudor government, was essentially about institutions, about rules, about modernity. I believe that most government in most periods is about people.

David Starkey23:08

Because what I think government is about is the backstairs. And we've discovered that this is as true of our own period as it is of the sixteenth century. We had, of course, a wonderful researcher, a man called Lord Hutton, who took apart the present government. He showed the foulness of language, the fact that we were ruled from a sofa. And around this this this this strange elected sovereign figure, these individuals who've never been elected have gone through no formal process of appointment. Now that's the inner core of Downing Street. What I studied was the exact equivalent at the court of Henry VIII, presided over not by Alastair Campbell, but by the gloriously named figure, the groom of the stole, who was in charge of Henry VIII's lavatory. He was also the patronage secretary. He handled the private

Presenter23:58

These were the movies in the shape of the

David Starkey24:00

Literally the movers, yes. Henry VIII apparently always felt happier when he'd had a good motion.

Presenter24:05

You are speaking, not writing, at the moment. Are you sure it's true?

David Starkey24:07

I'm sure it's true.

Presenter24:10

But anyway, the point being that this was a kind of classic academic difference of opinion between you and your mentor, Tor G. R. L.

David Starkey24:17

Absolutely.

Presenter24:18

And over the years it became incredibly personal, didn't it? It became in in the end in writing an all-out attack from one.

David Starkey24:26

One to the other. Uh what happened was I wrote what I thought was a a fun review of his th uh third volume of collected essays. Um and Geoffrey got very cross about this and when my book on the English court came out, Geoffrey took upon himself to write a devastating review and he sent it to me on Christmas Eve, deliberately designed to arrive then. And he claimed that the thing was littered with factual errors and he listed them. And I read the first one and I checked the rest.

David Starkey24:58

He was right.

David Starkey25:01

Uh Christmas Eve was abandoned rather rapidly, and then I checked the next.

David Starkey25:06

He was wrong.

David Starkey25:07

The next

David Starkey25:09

He was wrong, and the third, and the fourth, and the fifth, and the sixth, in his enthusiasm to pick me up, he had his eyesight was failing.

David Starkey25:17

He had actually misread documents, so I thought I am going.

David Starkey25:24

It was a very un-Christmas thought.

Presenter25:26

You did get him. I mean, cut to the chase. You got him. I did get him.

David Starkey25:26

You did get some cut

David Starkey25:29

I did get him. Um what happened was the uh editor of the journal said now come on I'm having no fisticuffs and I said no, there will be no fisticuffs and when he'd read the piece he said well there were no fisticuffs instead you dipped him in an acid bath slowly and starting with the feet.

Presenter25:50

What was the effect?

Presenter25:52

On him.

David Starkey25:54

Very shortly afterwards he died, and we'd had a renewal of the quarrel.

David Starkey25:59

The day before his final heart attack.

David Starkey26:02

I suppose it's the ultimate of academic disputes. It is one that I think neither party should be very proud of.

Presenter26:10

Intellectually.

Presenter26:12

I have no regrets. Intellectually, I have no regrets.

David Starkey26:12

I have no regrets.

David Starkey26:15

But personally it was personally it was a scandal.

Presenter26:15

But personally

David Starkey26:18

Um, as I said, both parties behaved about as badly as they could have done.

Presenter26:23

Number six.

David Starkey26:25

Yeah.

Presenter26:25

Ugh.

David Starkey26:25

Well, um let's have something that gets us out of that mood, and it's a wonderful aria. It's Mozart's Dove sono from the marriage of Figaro. It's languorous, sad, but only half serious.

Speaker 326:51

We do it.

Speaker 327:21

With wit of Romans on its day.

Speaker 327:32

Yeah.

Presenter27:38

Kiri Tukanoa singing the Countess's Ariadove sono from Mozart's Marriage of Figaro with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir George Schulte.

Presenter27:48

David, you moved into newspapers really as the the royal marriage, the Charles and Diana marriage began to disintegrate. You became this pithy, well informed expert on the House of Windsor for various newspapers. Again, a great fit, wasn't it? You suddenly be found yourself very marketable.

David Starkey28:06

Well, it was, and it was very striking. Because, of course, monarchy is much the same in whatever period you look at.

Presenter28:12

I spotted it.

David Starkey28:14

I spotted it.

David Starkey28:15

I also spotted that Diana was a genuine A grade platinum plated celebrity.

David Starkey28:23

Right from the beginning, and that was the way to approach her.

Presenter28:27

You said that you said I understood Diana. Now that's quite a claim.

David Starkey28:31

Well, I think I did, because she seemed to me to be very comprehensible. Women marrying into a royal house, suddenly presented with all the opportunities and all the problems, are relatively frequent figures. What was also important was Diana was amazingly inventive. She invented a new form of photograph in which she would do one of these amazing poses. They were cartoon poses, grotesque overacting, for some headline.

Presenter29:03

But therefore she but she was it wasn't all of her own creation, well she was created by the society in which she lived, in in which we live, which is it which is obsessed by celebrities.

David Starkey29:04

But therefore she was

David Starkey29:12

We live in the

David Starkey29:15

She herself was obsessed by celebrity. The society was, and she was, each fed off the other. What would she spend most of her time doing, crawling over the floor, looking at these selfsame tabloid headlines and pictures of herself?

Presenter29:30

But therefore she's not the hapless victim of of an awkward family issue? She's the hapless victim of of of our society.

David Starkey29:34

Of an awkward family.

David Starkey29:39

Yes, because as also we talked about killing the king. With every celebrity there is the process of creation, elevation and destruction. We've just seen it with

David Starkey29:50

what will now for ever be known as Poor Germain Greer.

David Starkey29:54

That moment of crash, of burning Icarus has got too near the sun, the wax has melted, the feathers come off the wings, and Germaine like Diana.

Presenter30:08

Well, that was a good piece to cameras.

Presenter30:10

And that wasn't even

David Starkey30:11

Scripted, my dear.

David Starkey30:14

You're inspiring too fairly.

Presenter30:15

Very superior. Go on. Record number seven.

David Starkey30:18

Well, this is very much of that type. It's an astonishing, astonishing aria. Um from the end of Monteverde's The Coronation of Popper, it's a love duet of the most complete beauty and the most absolute total cynicism, just like Diana.

Speaker 330:36

Oh kiss the

Speaker 330:39

Uh

Speaker 331:08

We are here.

Speaker 331:21

Praise God.

Presenter31:35

Purti miro, purtigodo I gaze at you, I possess you. The end of Montevedi's The Coronation of Poppaire, with Magda Laszlo as Poppaire and Richard Lewis as Neroni, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by John Pritchard.

Presenter31:49

David Starker, your television career is riding high. You know, Don Henry. I'm sure. Yes, yes, I was wondering actually if that.

David Starkey31:53

For a form, I'm sure.

David Starkey31:56

After all the patronising of Germain's and Diana's, yes.

Presenter31:59

Let's see it.

Presenter32:01

But you know, you still have, don't you, the great work to write if you're going to establish the kind of reputation that your poor old mentor GR Elton has.

David Starkey32:11

Oh, I shall never have Elton's reputation. Um Elton uh made a superb academic career. He was fellow of the British Academy, he was knighted, he was Regis Professor at Cambridge. I shall be none of those things.

Presenter32:23

But are you happy then? Are you now settling for this role as popular television historian, or do you still ache to somehow write something on which your reputation as a historian other than television can be based?

David Starkey32:35

Well I I I write for anybody. Most academic books are dreadfully, dreadfully written. Elizabeth is a l I hope a great read. It's also solid history. Six Wives is a huge, huge book. It's also a good read. It's good history. You're right. You're hooked, aren't you, Arthur?

Presenter32:53

Yes, but you're hooked, aren't you, on big audiences? You're hooked on having lots of recent print runs of millions instead of this sort of academic.

David Starkey33:02

I actually believe that's where history belongs. The idea that history belongs only to the academic community is a disaster. Great historians are people like Macaulay, like Carlyle, like Gibbon, who are not within universities, who write for everybody, write to be understood by everybody.

Presenter33:22

So what are you? What's it saying on the

David Starkey33:23

John, you'll

Presenter33:24

Uh

David Starkey33:24

I've no idea because somebody else will write it. I shan't be vain enough to write my own epitaph. What I would hope it would say would be that he wrote big books for a big audience. But there is you're quite right. The biggest book I've been talking about.

Presenter33:40

I think you've just written it, David.

David Starkey33:41

And the biggest book is still there to be written, and it's my biography of Henry VIII. And that must come out in April two thousand nine, which is the five hundredth anniversary of his accession.

Presenter33:53

But you won't have time to do it because you're doing all of that.

David Starkey33:55

Oh yes, I will. I finished doing the television in 2006 seven. That gives me two years to write the book. As always, events will prove it.

Presenter34:04

But it'll be a big book. Whatever else it is.

David Starkey34:05

It'll be a big book on a big man.

Presenter34:10

Last record.

David Starkey34:11

And this is a big tune. It is the Hallelujah chorus from Handel's Messiah. I first really listened to the words when I was in the chapel of King's College at Cambridge. The words King of King and Lord of Lords rang out, and I realized it wasn't about Christianity at all. It was all about monarchy. And it's been, as if you like, my academic theme tune ever since.

Presenter35:30

The end of the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah, performed by the English Concert Choir with the English Concert directed by Trevor Pinnock. Now, David, if you could only take one of those eight records, which one would you take?

David Starkey35:42

It would have to be Dove Sono.

Presenter35:45

And your book then. You get the Bible, you get the complete works of Shakespeare.

David Starkey35:48

Oh, I thought about this an awful lot. The little bit of me would be quite happy to be on the desert island. And so what I'm going to do is take a tiny little book of about twenty-six pages called The Microcosmographia Academica, which is a satire on Cambridge written at the beginning of the last century by this wonderful Greek scholar, Francis Cornford, F. M. Cornford. It's wonderful. It will remind me.

Presenter35:51

The little

David Starkey36:15

of why I am quite happy to have left it all behind, but it will remind me with a smile and in beautiful language.

David Starkey36:25

And the luxury you get. It has got to be hot and cold running water, a large bathtub, and bath oil.

Presenter36:35

Am I allowed?

David Starkey36:35

Am I allowed?

Presenter36:37

You are, of course you are. You're allowed anything, David. David Socky, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

David Starkey36:40

They've

David Starkey36:43

Kiss you.

Speaker 236:52

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