AC Grayling

Presenter0:00

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.

Presenter0:08

The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand eight.

Presenter0:27

My castaway this week is the philosopher A. C. Grayling.

Presenter0:31

Praised for combining wide learning with wise argument, he's driven by the need to explore the profundity of our existence and the breadth of life's possibilities. Far from being an ivory tower dwelling academic, he views philosophy as a practical tool to unearth what is truly important, and he's been digging for a while. Aged twelve and a schoolboy in Africa, it was discovering Plato that thrilled him.

Presenter0:55

The thing about being a philosopher was that it meant you could command the whole horizon of human knowledge and endeavour.

Presenter1:01

That's the beauty of it.

Presenter1:03

So Anthony Greenland, commanding the whole horizon of human knowledge and endeavour, it's not a prospect then you find daunting at all.

AC Grayling1:11

Well, another way of putting the point is to say that you're given licence by philosophy to stick your nose into everybody's business and try and find out what they're what they're up to, why they're doing it, why it matters. And that's the exhilarating thing about it.

Presenter1:24

So what happened when you were this uh twelve year old schoolboy that ignited your interest?

AC Grayling1:29

Well, I'd come across references to these great names, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and I came across the collected dialogues of Plato in a little local library, a very eccentric little library, which I think some past British colonial servant had left behind him. And the very, very first volume contained all the early, very accessible, very simple dialogues of Plato, and by the greatest good luck I picked one of those and started to read it. In fact, it was a dialogue called The Carmedies. And it struck me like a hammer blow between the eyes, really, that here was this great name, Socrates, devoting himself to questions about the good, about beauty, about justice, about truth, you know, about all those stirring ideas. And I think I was hooked from then on.

Presenter2:16

The idea that philosophy is useful, it has to be said, is not a it's not a widely held one. Do you think philosophers themselves only have themselves to blame for that?

AC Grayling2:24

To some extent, yes. And that's a pity in a way, because right from the very earliest days, right indeed from the the time of Socrates and Plato, philosophy was something that all educated and thoughtful people engaged in, precisely because it addresses the questions about the good life and the good society. And everything that presses, everything that concerns people about how to live, what sort of people they should be, is there in philosophy, and more. So it should be a common possession.

Presenter2:50

You've said previously that you find the idea that we are only here for a brief amount of time invigorating. Explain explain that to me.

AC Grayling2:59

Well, I do. I keep saying to to people in lectures and things that if you think about it, the average human lifespan is less than a thousand months long. If you do the maths, you know, twelve times seventy-two. In fact, it's in the early eight hundreds of of months. And that means that uh y you've got to focus on what really matters and then go after that. And then, of course, the pursuit itself is the thing that generates this rich, deep kind of satisfaction that makes for a a truly good life.

Presenter3:24

Tell me about your first piece of

AC Grayling3:25

Well the first piece of music I I've chosen is uh the Adagio from Brown's violin concerto. Now this will be a tiny little bit controversial, especially among those friends of mine who know even more about music than I do, and who say, Oh, this is the you know the the perfect rottenness of the high romantic period of music. But this is such a beautiful piece of music and it seems to me to collect up and embrace so many of the things that are very best about the possibility of our human response to the world. And I think this violin concerto expresses it all.

Presenter5:00

Yehudi Menuen playing the adagio from Brahm's violin concerto in D major, with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Rudolph Kempe. So as I said in the introduction then, Anthony Gregling, you were brought up in Africa. You were born in Zambia.

Presenter5:13

In the forties. Your father worked for a bank. He was very well rewarded for that.

AC Grayling5:17

Well, he was, yes,'cause I I think the head office in London expected all its officials out in the tropics uh to die after a few years. And so they had these immensely generous terms of service. So my my parents travelled a very great deal as a result, uh popping us into boarding schools here and there. And what was your home like? Was it a lavish home? Well, it it was very comfortable, of course, because it was all laid on by the bank, and uh it was one reason why my mother, who absolutely hated Africa, didn't like it at all, but stuck with it because it was a jolly comfortable life, lots of servants and a very easy time, nothing to do but uh bridge and reading novels, and I suspect um you know um not necessarily of my parents, but at any rate among the expat community adultery, you know, th these were the the entertainments.

Presenter6:01

A your father did like Africa, though.

AC Grayling6:03

My father loved Africa. He was passionate about it. He was a great outdoors type, and in fact was involved with the setting up of one of the great national parks in Zambia, the Cifui National Park.

Presenter6:12

So it sounds like a bit of an odd partnership. There's your father immersing himself in everything that Africa has to offer, embracing it indeed, and and your mother happy to have plenty of servants in a rather nice house, but apart from that just just resenting it. I mean, did she resent it on a day to day basis? Did you feel her resentment?

AC Grayling6:28

Oh, yes, very much so, yes. She was a difficult character a rather neurotic, nervous, very feisty, very dominant character in the household environment, and um it's hard to imagine quite how she would have managed with the realities of being back here, because there certainly wouldn't have been troops of servants to look after her.

Presenter6:47

What did she look like? Did she look terribly English in the middle of it all?

AC Grayling6:51

Well, um she she was very uh she was short, she was only about five foot tall, so she always uh had this rather buffon hairstyle, and you see, to give her a few extra inches, and very, very high heels, which she wore even first thing on a Sunday morning, and uh a a terrifying mien, I think. Uh I say all these things about her because uh as uh the youngest child by by some years after my older siblings, I was always kind of an observer o of this, and a slightly amused one, of her interactions with the rest of the family, where there was, you know, a certain amount of sparks flying and and um thunder rolling, and uh she and I understood one another well enough for that not to be the case with our relationship.

Presenter7:28

And were you brought up by her or were you brought up by essentially the nanny or the servants?

AC Grayling7:33

I was really brought up by the servants. My parents were rather remote figures, you know, occupied with what they were doing. And one consequence of this remoteness was that when I went to boarding school at the age of seven and thought, because nobody had informed me differently it was quite comical to think back on it now that my parents would ever come back and collect me, I thought that phase of my life was over and I wouldn't be seeing them again. And I suppose this is an early example of the kind of impracticality of being logical. Since nobody had mentioned what was going to happen afterwards, you know, that they were going to come back and fetch me again at the end of term or something, I didn't assume that that would be the case.

Presenter8:12

What about the racial inequalities? How how early I mean clearly, as a very bright little boy, how how quickly did you begin to understand the chasm?

AC Grayling8:19

Oh, uh or s straight away. I mean, it was it was very obvious, and it was something that, uh, from a pretty early age bothered me.

AC Grayling8:27

I mean, on one occasion I saw um w w one of our servants uh at the end of a of a long corridor in this great colonial bungalow that we lived in, and I ran down the corridor and threw my arms round his neck, and my sister was walking along behind me, and she said

AC Grayling8:41

You mustn't do that to servants. You mustn't do that kind of thing.

AC Grayling8:45

And uh I was about three or four at the time, and I remember being very struck and rather troubled by by that. Yeah, that was very much part of the picture.

Presenter8:54

Tell me about your second piece of music.

AC Grayling8:56

My second uh piece of music is uh a little very familiar piece by Schumann, Tramerai. I think almost everybody learns this when they're learning the piano. One of the great joys of my early life was music, learning music. I started playing the piano about the age of of six, and it's a piece I still play with great enjoyment. It was uh, I dunno, sort of a high moment in a way, to be able to to to master something, even though it's a very simple piece really, with such wonderful lyricism.

Presenter10:20

Vladimir Horowitz playing Schumann's Trimurai. So you said that you you were around about age seven when you were sent off to boarding school, and as you understood it at the time, your parents said we're going now. They were going to was it America?

AC Grayling10:31

They were off to America, yes.

Presenter10:33

And you thought they really were going, that was that.

AC Grayling10:34

Yeah, I did, yeah. I mean, it was sort of quite distressing and and shocking for for a little while, but you know, when you're that age and you're caught up in busy school life, you you pretty soon adjust. And uh I got kinda plunged into school life, and when they turned up again, it was about six months later, I think, I was quite surprised to see them.

Presenter10:55

You are diligent.

AC Grayling10:56

Yeah.

AC Grayling10:57

I think I wasn't uh uh too bad. Yes, uh uh luckily things came easily, so it was easy to be diligent uh in a way.

Presenter11:05

Your mother said of you at the time that you were as clever as a bag full of monkeys, and in fact told you not that you were too clever by half. It's interesting that she.

Presenter11:14

equated being smart with sort of showing off, really.

AC Grayling11:18

Yes, and I'm afraid she was probably right about that too. I shouldn't wonder. But the question is.

Presenter11:23

But you're a smart Alec.

AC Grayling11:24

Well, I'm I'm afraid so. I think so. There's a certain temptation to be. And the point I think was this, that with my older siblings, my sister and brother, there were difficulties, there were problems about both of them. And my sister was disabled in a way that was central to her story. And my brother was absolutely a wonderful man, but he didn't really enjoy doing exams and so on. And so my mother used to worry about that and push him a bit. And but so far as I was concerned, she used to say, Oh, at least I don't have to worry about you. You're always going to sort yourself out one way or another. And so it was a kind of relief to her.

Presenter12:01

You talk about your mother in in a very sort of reasonable, almost disconnected way, as if you're talking about somebody that you have observed.

Presenter12:09

As a little boy, were you observing her? I mean a lot of you know, children

Presenter12:14

Traditionally, they feel a lot more emotional and on occasion very angry about their parents' conduct if they don't feel it quite makes them off.

AC Grayling12:20

Yeah. No, no, it it it was because uh um uh o of having this f rather remote relationship with them that that it was possible to uh observe them. My father was uh a naturally rather warm person, warm hearted person, a very likable person, but also a very traditional sort of Edwardian father, I suppose. He was on the horizon, this this rather benign presence, but but a great distance away. Now, obviously, my my mother was uh you know more physically and uh um auditorily present in in life, but also rather a distant character herself. She wasn't a warm person, uh or or a loving one particularly, and so it wasn't that kind of relationship between me and her. But I understood her. Even then uh I didn't you know resent or pine for or or feel the lack of any kind of maternal warmth, because I did get a a great deal of warmth from our servants with whom I had a very good close relationship. And even indeed today to call them servants seems hard. They they were my family really.

Presenter13:20

Let's take a break for some music.

AC Grayling13:23

As a teenager I played in a band, an extremely bad one, I have to say. We used to play at parties and gigs and concerts sometimes. But we covered all the Beatles and Stones and Kinks and Animals and all that kind of thing, really sixties stuff, and I've still got the hairstyle to prove it. And one of the bands that we liked very much was The Kinks, because Ray Davis of the Kinks is a wonderful writer of pop music. And the song that I've chosen here is not one that we ourselves played because the band had disbanded by the time that this one was produced. But it reminds me very much of those days. It's very evocative of the sixties and those experiences. And it's also, by the way, a song that I say to my wife that I dedicate to her because it's rather apropos.

Speaker 214:07

Thank you for the day.

Speaker 214:12

Those endless days, those sacred days you gave me I'm thinking of the days

Speaker 214:21

I won't forget a single day, believe me.

Speaker 214:26

God bless the Lord.

Speaker 214:28

I bless the light, the lights on you, believe me.

Presenter14:33

The Kinks and Days. So, Anthony Grayling, you came to study in Britain, first at Sussex University, also at London and Oxford. You fitted in a lot of learning, and and it you'd only been here for a few months when you heard

AC Grayling14:43

Hang on.

Presenter14:46

that your sister had disappeared.

Presenter14:49

Um tell me more about your sister. I mean her life was

Presenter14:53

in the end a tragic one, but prior to that a a remarkable life.

AC Grayling14:57

Well, yes, she was my parents' oldest child, and uh she was born in Lewanshire. My mother had a tremendously difficult labour, but my sister was a of forceps delivery, and the forceps crushed her skull, damaging areas of the brain that control motor function. So although she was completely normal in every other respect, she had a a bad motor tremor. Her hands shook and her her limbs shook, and so she couldn't pick up a glass of water easily, or a cup of tea, or handle a knife and fork, and so on. And being completely normal in in all other respects meant that she was, you know, uh a prisoner of this condition, and felt it very acutely. She was acutely self-conscious, especially of course as a teenager, but but even earlier. And then our local doctor read a a paper in a medical journal about a new technique that had been developed, freezing irritant brain cells that caused this uh motor disability. And so my sister went and she had this brain operation, which almost completely cured her. And this in a way was the beginning even of the sort of greater tragedy, because liberated from this enslavement to a disability, she sort of went mad, trying to uh do what everybody else had done, you know, have boyfriends and go to parties and live a sort of wild life, but without having had any of the experiences that help you to manage your emotions a bit better and to understand relationships a bit better. And she met somebody and within a very short time married him, within a matter of just a couple of months. And it was he who, after they'd been married for about two months, reported that she was missing. And there was a great pol police search for her and lots of inquiries, and then eventually her body was found, and she had been murdered.

AC Grayling16:47

Well, as if that weren't bad enough, the problem was that my mother at that time was not well. She had a heart condition, and a couple of weeks later she had a heart attack and herself died. And of course, this terrible double blow in in the family was, of course, felt by all of us, but my brother and I were tremendously worried about my father, for whom it was the most awful, awful tragedy. And I think that the fact that my brother and I felt a responsibility to try and be as supportive as possible to my father meant that neither he nor I had an opportunity to grieve properly then, and it may be that we've been

Speaker 317:09

Yeah.

Speaker 217:09

Uh

AC Grayling17:25

We've been catching up ever since.

Presenter17:27

Let's take a break for some music then. Tell me what you've chosen next.

AC Grayling17:30

Well, this is a piece of music which uh I came to love uh about this time. I was at this time as an undergraduate becoming even more interested in in music and trying to make uh something of a study of it. And this one is uh a piece of Beethoven. It's from a symphony that um not not many people rate really. I suppose they all like the odd-numbered symphonies three, five, seven, and nine. Uh but this is the fourth symphony, and it turns out to be one of the greatest and most beautiful pieces of music that Beethoven, in my uh opinion, ever produced.

Presenter18:49

The Adagio from Beethoven's fourth symphony, performed by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Wilhelm Fort Wenke. You were saying, Anthony Grehling, that at university you started taking music a lot more seriously, became a lot more interested in music. It's right also that you began to compose music.

AC Grayling19:07

Yes, as a an exercise in trying to understand music, painting, uh theatre, uh I did, you know, I I tried to write a a piano concerto and I tried to write a play and and I tried to paint a picture, not i w really seriously in the hope of doing anything that would be you know uh successful, but in order to have the experience f from the inside.

Presenter19:27

But it's all part of this thirst that you have to let me quote you back again to command the whole horizon of human knowledge and endeavour. It's all part of that.

AC Grayling19:35

It is, yes, in in this sense that, you know, we compartmentalize, we divide things up into, you know, different subjects of study, all learning in ology. But actually it's just one great thing, which is the attempt to make sense of this world and to take part in the conversation about it, contributing something to the discussion, hoping not to close it down, but hoping to learn something by engaging in this process.

Presenter19:58

But at the same time as throwing yourself into all of these activities, you were also pursuing your formal education, your academic work, and indeed I'm sure it was very.

Presenter20:07

demanding of you.

Presenter20:10

It sounds like at that stage in your life you were something of a of a workaholic.

AC Grayling20:15

Well, yes, and in fact I have uh r remained so. I mean one response to those those difficulties in our family history was to just immerse um oneself in work and and reading and learning things, wi with the determination really to try to um you know make some kind of progress out of that situation. It's a very productive way of of um of healing, I suppose.

Presenter20:39

And what about I mean, you've written about it often, the the importance to you of living what you call, you know, a good life. Was that when this began to to take root, the idea that in among the tragedy and the the distortion that you've had to put up with, you would find a way of living that that brought you

Presenter20:55

Um a solace in in truth, if you like.

AC Grayling20:58

Yes, I should explain straightaway, by the way, that this rather mealy mouthed expression, the good life, doesn't in my case and shouldn't in anybody's case I don't think necessarily be a sort of goody two-shoes kind of life, not in the moralistic. S some of my friends, when they read the things that I've written about these, say you shouldn't call your work about moral values, you should say it's about immoral values.

Speaker 221:09

Like not in the moralistic

Presenter21:11

Yeah.

AC Grayling21:21

But but the essential thing about the the good or the welded life is that it should be a life of endeavour. The aim should be to achieve something, to make something.

Presenter21:31

about engaging.

AC Grayling21:32

Yes, but engaging, exactly. F for for for me the good life i is the life where you're constantly learning, constantly trying to make sense of things, constantly trying to be a good a good partner, a good citizen in this world of ours in one way or another. Because you know, it's not really

Presenter21:32

Yeah.

AC Grayling21:48

Succeeding with something, but it's trying to succeed, and that is the living of the good life.

Presenter21:54

There is so much to ask you, and I will in just a moment for neither let's take a break and tell me about your next piece of music.

AC Grayling22:00

I'm going to choose a piece of music sung by the choir of Maudlin College, Oxford, which is my own old college at Oxford. When I was uh there, the person in charge of the choir at Maudlin was a man called Bernard Rose, and while he was there, he made the choir of Maudlin College even better than it had been, and it is one of the great church choirs. And I speak here as a pretty trenchant atheist. It would surprise people to know that I used to go quite often to Evensong at Maudlin just to listen to this delicious music. And here is the choir of Maudlin College being directed by Bernard Rose.

Speaker 323:02

I see the hearts of you.

Presenter23:30

The nundymatus sung by the choir of Maudlin College, Oxford, directed by Bernard Rose.

Presenter23:36

When you were in your twenties then, Anthony, you had this um extraordinary episode. I'm not quite sure how to quantify it. You had this this racing heart, palpitations, and you felt possibly you were going to die.

AC Grayling23:47

Yes. I mean, really, it was a little bit more. You laughed at now, but at the time it was. No, I wasn't laughing at the time at all. No, it was a hypochondriacal attack. And what it was a very, very hot summer's day. And I started to feel a bit peculiar. And I slumped into a chair. And as I sat there feeling these pins and n needles creeping up my arms and legs, and I thought, you know, when they meet in the middle, that would be it. And finally, the doctor did come and and tested me. I clutched his white coat as he tried to walk away, saying, I can take it, doctor, you you can tell me how long have I got He said, There's absolutely nothing wrong with you.

Presenter23:48

No, I wasn't laughing at the time at all.

AC Grayling24:16

So it was quite quite a comic experience in a way, but it was also at at a m for for a moment or two anyway a very real one. And in that moment it was like an epiphany in a way of thinking, yes, you know, all of one's life, past and future, meets here in the present, and that's why you've got to keep that intensity going and not give up.

Presenter24:38

I wondered if I dare use the word epiphany, because that's what it sounded to me like you were describing there. Was there any moment when you touched you reached out and touched the possibility of religion, or religion touched you, during that episode?

AC Grayling24:52

No, my my religion religion has has always been a very sceptical one. Al always. Always, yes. Um my parents were not at all uh religious and we lived a very secular kind of life. You know, i i if you had read um Greek mythology, let's say, then you know that Zeus has made lots of mortal maidens pregnant who have given birth to heroes and who go down to Hades and come back again. And you know, the Christian story is is a version of that story, and why should it be one that's any more special than the others? And we think of them all anyway as myths, and you know, that that's it just seems kind of commonsensical to me.

Presenter24:56

Yeah.

Presenter25:23

You also say, you also write that you are a spiritual person, that you believe in spirituality. Unpack that a bit then.

AC Grayling25:31

Well, I mean it in a very secular sense. I mean it in the sense of our heart and mind, our emotional and intellectual reactions to things, to the fact that our response to other people and to this world that we occupy has a very, very, very deep basis of sentiment. That our need for love particularly, for friendship, and for contact with things that are beautiful and refreshing, are what make us what we are as human beings. I think people connect their own human kind of spirituality to religion because they want some sort of explanation for it, but you don't need it.

Presenter26:07

And this is why we might find you standing in one of those little abandoned churches in Norfolk and and enjoying everything that it or at least not everything, but at least some of what it has to offer.

AC Grayling26:14

Emma.

AC Grayling26:16

But at least some of what it has to offer. Absolutely. And and you might very well find me standing in a field or on a beach or in a concert or or at an exhibition of paintings, because they are all spiritual exercises too, or just sitting and having a cup of tea with friends. I mean, I think that's something that can that can be part of the spiritual life.

Presenter26:34

Tell me about your next piece of music, then.

AC Grayling26:36

I've become a sort of passionate lover of the cello as an instrument, and I've chosen here the first movement of the first cello concerto by Saint Sans, which um has some of the elements of what makes the cello such a great concert instrument.

Presenter27:50

Mr Slav Rostropovich playing the first movement of Sans Somme's cello concerto number one.

Presenter27:55

Let's examine for a minute your scalpel like mind. I mean, I would expect you to be incredibly articulate, but the sense in which every idea seems to be fully formed, it seems to travel in a circle and have a beautifully formed full stop at the end of it.

Presenter28:11

Are you conscious that you have to keep it alive, to preserve it, to make it as acute as it can be? I mean, for example, do you enjoy a bottle of wine in the evening? Do you do those things that people like to do to actually almost shut their minds down?

AC Grayling28:26

Uh no, I don't. And despite being a um a denizen of of the sixties and and again, you know, with the hairstyle and everything else, I've never taken any of the drugs like pot or cocaine or anything like that, really out of fear, because you know, what passes for for my brain is my instrument. And it's um there's there's always been an anxiety about doing anything to it that blunts it. So I I don't drink alcohol and I don't take drugs, although I have made myself a promise that if I do reach the age of eighty, I'm going to take up opium then.

Presenter28:32

Command of

Presenter28:58

Why would that be?

AC Grayling28:59

Just to have some of the dreams, you know, wonderful dreams that never come true.

Presenter29:03

And so you imagine for yourself then that up until eighty you will still be operating at the level. I mean, you're a professor of philosophy in Atbert College. You write insightful essays. Do you imagine you're going to be?

Presenter29:14

working at that race until you're eighty.

AC Grayling29:16

Well, I'd hope so. I'd hope so, because I think the worst thing that anybody can do is retire, really. It's very, very bad for people. People who retire and um don't feel that life is very full and they they don't feel very useful any longer sort of give up too soon. And uh that that would be a mistake.

Presenter29:33

I want to talk just for a moment about your father, then, who lived to a good age. It it's your belief that your father

Presenter29:40

Well, didn't exactly choose the moment of his dying, but certainly had some influence upon it. Can you explain that?

AC Grayling29:46

Yes, I I think he did, and I think this is quite a a common thing, too. After my sister's mother's deaths he stayed on in in Africa. In fact, he ended up living in the Cape.

AC Grayling29:57

I got a telephone call one day, I was teaching at Oxford at the time, to say that he was unwell and that they didn't expect him to last more than a couple of days, and I flew out there. My brother, who now lives in Australia, flew to be with him as well. We turned up. Now, the thing about my father was that he had the most beautiful manners. He was a man of infinite courtesy, and the thought of dying while he had visitors just simply would not cross his mind. He was not a gentlemanly. So we sat with him for a couple of weeks in the hospital.

Presenter30:21

It's not gentlemen, really at all.

AC Grayling30:26

And finally, this is the middle of the summer term, and I said, I've got pupils back at the university just about take exams, I've got to get back there and uh we we made our farewells and I jumped on the plane and when I got back to England it was to discover that he had died that night. And I think that happens very often, that people do have a sense of when they're ready to go, and then they let go.

Presenter30:48

Tell me then about your next piece of music.

AC Grayling30:51

Well, I I associate this uh piece of music very very much with my father because he was in in particular a lover of uh the piano, and so my earliest musical memories include among them listening to Chopin waltzes and uh preludes and nocturnes. And I've chosen here one of Chopin's nocturnes, the E flat major nocturnes.

Presenter32:09

Vladimir Ashkenazi, playing Chopin's Nocturne in E flat major. You are married now for the second time. You are married to the writer Katie Hickman. You've got a young daughter. She's eight, Madeline, isn't she? Um What about fatherhood second time around, because you had two children from your first marriage as well. Do do you find it a very different experience?

AC Grayling32:27

Well, it's a very much better experience for this reason that your first children, I think, bring you up, so you make all the same mistakes again, only much better the second time round. I'm tremendously grateful to my older children for what they did teach me, and I'm sure that my little daughter is going to be very grateful to them for what they did.

Presenter32:45

Do you know, I'm wondering what life is like for Madeline if Daddy's a philosopher. I mean, it's not like

Presenter32:50

working in the city or mending pipes, or does it fundamentally affect the way you parent? Do you have discussions with her?

Presenter32:57

Approach philosophy.

AC Grayling32:57

Well, yes, I do, because of course children are very natural philosophers. And I can't tell you how helpful and salutary it is to have an eight-year-old daughter who says, Oh, you know, daddy, that's a very silly idea, and you know, because it keeps you on the straight and narrow a little bit. You realize that she's seeing some things much more clearly than you are.

Presenter33:17

And what about your confirmed atheism, then? Do you do you feel the need to give her the benefit of both sides of the argument when it comes to whether or not she might be religious?

AC Grayling33:26

Well, uh w we do talk about these things obviously. She she once said to me w when she was much littler, she said uh um am I allowed to believe in fairies? she said. It was rather a face at that one, because I I said to her, It's not a question of what you're allowed to believe, it's it's a question of what one is entitled to believe if one looks at the evidence and all that kind of thing. But she really did, you know, w want to believe in fairies while her milk teeth were still coming up, because of course it's profitable to do so a rational child.

Presenter33:50

Yeah.

Presenter33:52

Um tell me then about your final piece of music, Hansley.

AC Grayling33:56

Well, the final piece of music uh I've chosen uh Angela Gyogyu, um the aria from uh Puccini's Madam Butterfly, Unbaldi, that wonderful aria in the in the second act. I lived in China for for a time and I was also a visiting professor at Tokyo University in Japan. This one always makes me uh cry because it's such a beautiful piece of music, but it also reminds me of some great experiences that I've had living in the Far East.

Speaker 334:22

Quesado, quesado.

Speaker 334:26

Comisor jundo quidiro.

Speaker 334:44

He o saints are the risk foster Ministaronas cross oh por per cherio

Presenter35:22

Angela Giorgiu and Anne Bell D one Fine Day from Puccini's Madam Butterfly. Sir Anthony, I will gi I'm well, I'll give you the Bible. I don't know if you want the Bible. That's

AC Grayling35:31

No, no, I love it, especially if it's the the s King James Version, the most beautiful, beautiful language.

Presenter35:37

Right, I shall give you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and you get to take one other book. What will your book be?

AC Grayling35:42

Well, I'm going to be stuck on this desert island for a bit, so I need to take uh Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities. This is a a book that really ought to be better known. Um for one thing, it's huge, it's three volumes, and the third volume is incomplete. Now there's a challenge what one could sit and and and try and finish it.

AC Grayling36:00

It's the kind of book that when you're reading it you find yourself putting down on your knee and and wandering off into thought. And uh that's the mark of a very fine book.

Presenter36:08

It's yours, and the luxury.

AC Grayling36:11

Well, I I know I'm not allowed to take uh Katie, my my wife, which is v very sad, so I'm going to have to ask for a very, very good grand piano, and I can get back up to speed with some of the music that I've always loved to play.

Presenter36:24

You may have that. And if you had to save one of these disks from the waves, which one would it be?

AC Grayling36:29

Well, I think I would keep the bronze violin concerto, because, as a musical experience, it's one that I could listen to again and again and again and get lost in. It would in fact be like a world itself, and so my desert island would become something vast.

Presenter36:42

Anthony Grilling, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

AC Grayling36:46

Thank you very much.

Presenter36:54

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/radio4.