Robert Harris

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

Presenter0:10

For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.

Presenter0:34

My castaway this week is the best selling writer Robert Harris. He was apparently a political junkie from a young age, just six when he penned the essay Why Me and My Dad Don't Like Sir Alec Douglas Hume. His first novel had a somewhat catchier title, Fatherland. In it he imagined a world after the Nazis had won the Second World War. It sold more than three million copies and made him a household name.

Presenter0:59

His later books include Enigma, about the wartime code breakers at Bletchley Park, and the political thriller The Ghost, both also successful films. He has spent years as a journalist, too, writing in his phrase History on the Wing.

Presenter1:12

Politics is the essence of life, he says. It's the most incredible theatre of characters, drama, incident, unexpected events, human frailties, astonishing courage. The whole business, the cavalcade, fascinates me all the time.

Presenter1:27

So you're fascinated by politics, you you have the education, you have the background, it's it's in your blood, but you've never been tempted to stand for Parliament yourself. Why not?

Robert Harris1:36

Um, I think that I'm at heart a writer and I don't think I'm a very good team player. I have no desire for power, actually. I hate bossing people around and wouldn't want to do it. And I I do admire people that have the tenacity to do it, actually.

Presenter1:52

Do you admire politicians? Because of course that's not a very fashionable uh opinion these days for people to hold them in high esteem.

Robert Harris1:59

Admire may not be the right word. Sympathize, understand, see the distorting effects of the trade on human beings and how they have to adapt to it. And of course, part of this entails necessary hypocrisy and deceit. Only r large. I mean, I think we all practise what politicians do, but on a smaller, more private scale we're not caught out. We don't have to answer for our every statement they do. And it's very easy to make politicians look villainous or ridiculous. It goes with the territory.

Presenter2:30

Um, you made your living as a journalist for some years. You also worked in T V. We'll talk about both of those later. But but now a best selling author, and you choose still to dip in and out of journalism. Do you find it quite easy to um to travel between fact and fiction?

Robert Harris2:46

Well, I suppose a lot of people would say journalists.

Robert Harris2:49

I do some journalism from time to time to sort of keep my hand in and because you know it's useful to do it. But I see myself primarily and have done now for the best part of twenty years as a as a writer of fiction.

Presenter2:50

We're giving you the benefit of the doubt.

Robert Harris3:05

Given your stage

Presenter3:05

In life, given your experience of writing fiction, do you find yourself being more sympathetic towards people because you probably do understand them in the round?

Robert Harris3:14

I think maybe as one gets older one becomes more sympathetic towards people, don't you? Think? I don't think that's necessary a result of uh inventing characters. I think it's as you make your own mistakes or you see your friends make mistakes, you get to be more, I think, sympathetic to people generally. Or maybe you don't. Maybe one becomes an angry old man waving your stick at the modern world, but I don't tend to do that.

Presenter3:32

Portal paper.

Presenter3:37

What about writing about Hitler, then, that that you've done with great success? Did did you come to understand him and and be maybe sympathetic's the wrong word, but at least understand what it was that so captivated the people in in at that moment in time?

Robert Harris3:50

Yes, I mean I think th as you say, sympathetic is not the right word at all, but an understanding. I think one can understand things about Hitler. For instance, he went through four years right on the front line in the First World War. I mean, with no kind of grief counselling or trauma counselling or whatever. Anyone who who went through that is going to come out of it somewhat strange, I think. Now that so many years have elapsed since he died, I think it's it's more useful for us to try to understand what sort of person he was than to simply uh demonize him.

Presenter4:28

And you say you live in the house that Hitler built?

Robert Harris4:32

Well, I'm not very good with money, but the one thing I did do that was sensible was after Fatherland I saw we saw that my wife and I this house in the country and uh I wrote a check for it and that's it. We've lived in it ever since and uh my friends all said that's the house that Hitler bought.

Presenter4:48

Let's dive into your music then. What are we going to hear first off this morning, Robert Harris?

Robert Harris4:53

Well, I very much like Baroque music, and I think probably Bach is the greatest composer. And uh this piece of music from St Matthew's Passion I used to play every night when I'd finished uh the day's writing of Fatherland actually in uh the early nineties. At that time on computers you used to have to go through quite a laborious process of saving files and so on, your day's work, and as I did that each day I would always play this particular track.

Speaker 35:22

And five.

Speaker 35:35

Ismail Herzegovine, Ichmir Desmond, Ichmir Desmond.

Presenter6:19

Ulrich Kold singing the Aria Machediche Mein Herzeg Rhein, Make thyself clean, my heart from Bach St. Matthew Passion. Um Robert Harris, you've written many books where the backdrop is War, Fatherland, Enigma, The Ghost, even Gotcha. I'm wondering if there's a little part of you that thinks you would have been

Presenter6:36

Quite a different person, maybe a better person, if you'd fought in a war.

Robert Harris6:40

Well, I yes, I think that I was born in 1957, so only twelve years after the end of the Second World War, and it was a very big thing in my childhood growing up. I mean, it it pervaded popular culture, comics, t what was on television, movies and so on. And so there is a little part of me, as for many men of my generation, I think. Wonder how we would have reacted, you know. And I think there is a sense that our generation has not been tested in the way that our parents' and grandparents' generation was, and we'd never had that sense of commonality, of fighting a greater enemy, of all being thrown together. I mean, I'm very relieved, let me hasten to add, that I haven't had to fight, but nevertheless, you feel that there's a part of your personality that's not been explored? How do you think?

Presenter7:28

It shapes, or do you think it shapes, the decisions that our politicians make then these days, the fact that of course they are part of that generation that has never been to war?

Robert Harris7:36

I think that's very interesting. One of the things that surprised me about Tony Blair, who I knew quite well before he became Prime Minister, was how readily he would engage in war compared to his predecessors who had more experience of it.

Presenter7:53

So never been to war yourself, but you did uh go into some sort of battle in the nineteen eighties. You worked on Newsnight along with uh Jeremy Paxman. You ventured into this was uh about the time of the Afghan-Russian uh conflict, you you ventured into the Hindu Kush. What did you take with you? Let me get this clear, because I've read some very scurrilous rumours that you took some carpet slippers and a nice comfy pillow.

Robert Harris8:13

This is

Robert Harris8:15

This has been exaggerated with the retelling. Actually, Jeremy and I were working on a Panorama together and we uh went to the Khyber Pass, where to stay in Peshawar, and there was some talk that we might go over the border with the Mujahideen forces and get hit by helicopter gunships. I had privately resolved that this

Presenter8:23

Yeah.

Robert Harris8:34

Not something I intended to do. Jeremy Farmore, the gung ho war reporter, came out with a sort of thermal sleeping bag or whatever, and I kind of came out with a

Robert Harris8:47

and a dressing gown and uh when we unpacked in the uh Peshawar Hotel it was clear we'd come on different trips.

Robert Harris8:54

Yeah.

Presenter8:55

But still good friend.

Robert Harris8:55

Uh

Presenter8:55

Uh

Robert Harris8:56

Jeremy's been a very good friend. Yes, ever since I'm godfather to his eldest daughter he is to mine, and we still go on holiday every year, but now we do definitely stay in hotels.

Presenter9:06

Tell me about the f the fascination with politics then. How far back did it begin and and why did it begin?

Robert Harris9:13

Well, my father was very interested in politics and, you know, one imbibes one's parents' interest in politics. So I think it started then. My father had no interest in football, and neither did I. And politics, in a sense, became our football. I mean, it was something we would uh chew over. Uh m not just me, my mother and my sister as well.

Presenter9:35

Let's have some more music band. What are we going to hear next?

Robert Harris9:38

Well, my father was a big influence and my upbringing also touched on that period uh of the war which I became very interested in. And my father loved big band music and particularly Tommy Dorsey and I have a great love of uh Tommy Dorsey's on the sunny side of the street which I think the moment you hear those opening chords you're immediately back in uh the Second World War.

Presenter10:35

Tommy Dorsey and on the sunny side of the street. So, Robert Hurst, let's find out a little more about the early years. You were born in nineteen fifty seven in Nottingham. What was the family home like?

Robert Harris10:46

Um well, the family home was a council house that my grandfather got in nineteen thirty seven when it had been uh newly built, and that was where I spent uh my first six years. My sister was born uh two years after I was. I had a very happy childhood, actually. What did you do? Can't do.

Robert Harris11:03

He was a printer at a big firm called Foreman's in Nottingham. He had uh left school at fourteen. He left school on the Friday, I think, and started work on the Saturday morning. And it's right, is it that he hadn't fought in the war?

Presenter11:16

Yeah.

Robert Harris11:17

No, he he contracted polio when he was about uh eighteen months old. And I mean he could walk around all right, but he had a profound limp. Uh and I think that that experience really formed him. I mean he had to have electric convulsive therapy as a two-year-old. I remember him describing how his father would come towards him holding the calipers with for the electricity and he'd start howling and trying to get away. He was quite a a tough character. I mean he you know, he hadn't had it that easy, I think.

Presenter11:49

And what about your mother? What was she like?

Robert Harris11:51

My mother was a very sweet character, very quiet. She spent the first part of the war on a farm in Derbyshire, and then she was conscripted to Ericsson's, the big telecommunications firm near Nottingham, and then she went to work at Foreman's, and that's where my parents met. And nowadays we hear a lot of complaints about how many young people go to university. And it may be that too many do go, and some of that some of it is wasted. But I always think of my parents, who were both bright and who never got a chance. You know, they left uh school far too early.

Presenter12:27

Yeah. So what was their expectation, if indeed there was one, for you and your sister?

Robert Harris12:32

Well, I think that I think my father very much wanted me to be a solicitor, because I remember him telling me I could earn a hundred pounds a week, and I think he did have academic ambitions for me, but there was no I never felt pushed, and I see a lot more of my friends and people that I know now pushing their children a lot more. I am not conscious uh of ever having that. I was very fortunate, really.

Presenter12:57

Let's have some more music. What are we going to hear now?

Robert Harris12:59

My father was interested in jazz music. My mother was interested in classical music. And I remember when I was applying for university, about to take the entrance exam for Cambridge that I took a few days off school. And I used to play Vivaldi to get myself in the mood for this exam. And it seems to me completely to capture in music the architecture of Cambridge. So I would like Vivaldi's Gloria.

Speaker 313:31

Call you, call you.

Robert Harris13:31

Yeah.

Speaker 313:35

We accept his will.

Speaker 313:42

He has shut his kill.

Speaker 314:18

God's sleep.

Presenter14:26

The opening of Vivaldi's Gloria with the English concert and choir led by Trevor Pinnock. Um, Robert Howe's heading to Cambridge then. Both of your parents were uh were they cool, calm and collected about that, or did they have worries for you?

Robert Harris14:39

I think they were slightly astonished as indeed I was in a way. I think it's only now that I've got children, one of whom s start at university, one will be starting next year, that I appreciate what it must have meant to them. But, you know, I was when I look back, it was that awful thing of, you know, they would drop me off there and I couldn't wait for them to go. You know, that terrible way that one is with one's parents. I'm sure my children are with me.

Presenter15:03

And you seem to have settled into it pretty well. I mean, you launched yourself into student journalism.

Robert Harris15:09

Yes, I was fortunate in two ways. One is that I didn't have that crippling sense of trying to live up to something that my parents or teachers had imposed upon me. I was liberated. You know, every day that I didn't have to work in a factory was a day of victory for me. I was playing with a casino's money, and I think that gave me a terrific kind of confidence. I saw many contemporaries who were sort of weighed down by their background.

Presenter15:38

And you mean you're meaning here people who'd come from public schools whose parents ex

Robert Harris15:40

Yeah, his parents expect him to be in the Q C or especially if the parents had scrimped and saved to put them through that education. And then secondly, um I always knew what I wanted to do. I mean from the age of about eight I knew I wanted to write. So the moment I got to university I just made a B line for the student paper.

Presenter15:41

And to be the Q C or be the

Robert Harris15:57

and started work on it the following week and continued to write throughout the time at Cambridge.

Presenter16:03

Were you overflowing with confidence?

Robert Harris16:07

I don't know, maybe in some insufferable way I was.

Robert Harris16:12

I certainly never felt on the back foot, despite the fact that I'd been to a comprehensive school. I felt that in a sense it was a source of strength. I didn't have any difficulty about that. As I say, I took a view it was all there to have a go at, have a go at it. And if one fell on one's face, well, so on.

Presenter16:32

And what about expectation then with your own children? You have four children, as you say, they're about to some of them embark on that period of their lives. What what advice do you give them about what they should?

Robert Harris16:40

I wouldn't dream of proffering any advice. That would be a route to humiliation. It's funny, isn't it? I can I'm I can see that my background and odd oddly enough was wonderful in that it gave me I knew where I had to go, you know, I had to sort of get up, get out, get on. And I think it's harder in a way actually if both your parents went to university and you grow up and things are quite comfortable. Where's the spur? It's it's it's it's tougher, you know.

Presenter17:08

And you say that that from the age of eight you knew that you wanted to be a writer. Have you always been I mean, are you indeed when you're writing now?

Presenter17:15

Um

Presenter17:16

Obsessive about writing? Does it become the only thing that's happening?

Robert Harris17:20

I y yes. I think that when a book starts to form in your mind you often sort of drift off. You wake up in the small hours of the night actually thinking about it. And it is obsessive work. And I think if you weren't obsessive about it it probably wouldn't come alive.

Robert Harris17:36

Let's have some more music. What are we going to hear now?

Robert Harris17:39

Well, um in my view the greatest contribution of the Americans to twentieth century culture was the musical. This is just one out of a dozen or more musicals I'd have happily chosen, but I have gone for Guys and Dolls and the great show stopping song with its wonderful lyrics, Sit Down, You Rock in the Boat.

Speaker 418:00

And I said to myself, sit down, sit down, you rock in a boat. I said to myself, sit down, sit down, you rock in a boat. And the devil will drag you under with a soul so heavy you'd never float. Sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down, you rock.

Robert Harris18:10

Also h-

Speaker 318:13

Uh

Speaker 418:15

Sit down, you rockin', sit down, sit down, sit down, you rockin' the bolt. Sit down, you rockin', sit down, sit down, sit down.

Speaker 418:21

Ah

Presenter18:30

That was Stubby Kay and Sit Down Your Rock in the Boat from the original Broadway cast recording of Guys and Dolls. Robert Harris, you've said of today's Westminster, not only do we lack political personalities, but the vibrancy that should be part of the political debate. Why do you think that is?

Robert Harris18:47

Well, I think one's got to be careful at falling into the trap of thinking everything was much better years ago. But nevertheless, when I was taking uh an interest in politics when I was growing up, uh the great set peace speeches at party conferences, the clash at a party conferences, the oratory in the House of Commons, some sense of that has vanished from our political culture and we're left with a kind of rather dull trench warfare in which it's all defence and you're just frightened of making a mistake. And I suppose that this is down to the effects of uh television and the round the clock media. It's not that I think that the people are of lesser quality, but they don't somehow have the room to perform that they used to.

Presenter19:30

I'm wondering though you were political editor of The Observer uh during the nineteen nineties and I'm wondering I mean you were one of those people who urged Labour to get their act together to become this slick mean machine that was able to influence and indeed manipulate the media.

Robert Harris19:43

Yes, you know, Maya Culper in a way, and it's a sort of example of beware of what you wish for because you may get it. But along with that, I do think came a sort of willingness to use opinion polls and focus groups to find out what people were thinking and then to reflect it back at them in policies. And that has done British politics a disservice. And you know, look at the people turning out to vote, the numbers that vote are not are not what they used to be.

Presenter20:15

As a journalist during the nineteen ninety seven landslide for Labour, you were at Tony Blair's side as the polling results came in. And you have mentioned intriguingly, given what Mr Blair has subsequently said about his drinking habits, that you think one of the reasons that they allowed you to chum along with them was you became something of a drinking partner of his because nobody else wanted a drink.

Robert Harris20:33

Well, I d don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to suggest he's some kind of dipsomaniac. But he would do a big rally for Glasgow or something like that, and then we'd go out to the airport to get on the plane to fly back to London. And under the seat there were always bottles of that had been left by the Charter Air Company, and Cherie didn't drink, she was there, Alastair Campbell didn't drink, he was there, the Special Brands bodyguard obviously didn't drink. So Tony would fish rummage around, pull out a bottle and said, T Robert, you'd like a drink, wouldn't you? And then under cover of pouring one for me, he was able to have one himself.

Presenter21:05

Yeah, really, not too really.

Robert Harris21:06

And so yes, I think that I'd I would have liked to have thought that I had been invited along because of my political insight or great power as a writer, but it may have been simply because uh I too would have a drink in the evening with him. Let's have some more music. What are we going to hear?

Robert Harris21:22

Well, as I mentioned, my uh great joy is Baroque music, and it's the only music that I I find is a stimulus to creativity, and I listen to it a lot. And one of the joys of the Internet is that actually you can browse little known composers much more easily than you ever could when you used to have to go into a record store. Not that I'm saying this composer is uh unknown, but I would like to listen to Telemann's concerto for three oboes, three violins and uh bass.

Presenter22:54

Part of Telemann's concerto for three oboes, three violins and bass, played by the Consentus Musicus of Vienna, led by Nicolaus Alancourt. Um so your books translated into what a thirty odd languages, something like that. They sell in their millions. Fatherland was your first piece of fiction. You have said that when you started writing it I'm quoting you now you felt like you had a powerful car in the garage and were switching it on and realizing that there was literally nothing you could not do.

Presenter23:24

Uh

Robert Harris23:24

How exciting.

Presenter23:24

Exciting.

Robert Harris23:24

It was terrific. I can remember. It was a Saturday afternoon and I wrote the opening sentence and I practically had to go and lie down afterwards. The possibilities of it, and the feeling that I'd finally how old was I, early thirties, that I'd finally arrived at what I wanted to do, it was overwhelming.

Presenter23:45

Um a bidding war broke out over your book when the when it was um finally titered around by your agent. That must have been thrilling.

Robert Harris23:52

It was. Well, it was utterly uh bizarre. In fact, I hadn't even finished it. That happened, and I got more money, I think, than I had got in everything that I'd done earning up to that point. And I still hadn't finished the book. And then, um just as I finished it, there was a BBC documentary about Alan Turing.

Robert Harris24:12

And I thought, wouldn't that be a great character to have a code breaker as a central character and to write Set It in the War? And that was a very difficult book to write. It took me three years, and there was a year in there where I was really badly blocked, because I'd had this success with Fatherland, and I didn't really know how I'd managed it. By that time, we'd moved to the country to this house that Hitler had bought, and the rain t fell, and I sat and stared at the the blank screen. Anyway, one got through it.

Presenter24:40

Um what about the ghost then? People will be uh familiar with uh the book and of course it was turned into a successful and well reviewed uh movie. You did you co-write the screenplay or you wrote the screenplay? You worked with Roman Polanski, a very controversial figure. How did that go?

Robert Harris24:51

I did.

Robert Harris24:56

I took the view with Roman that I'd gone to start work with him when all these things that he'd done were perfectly well known, and that if I'd had some great moral objection to him, I should have not gone to work with him. Really, for three years I worked quite intensively with him, saw him a lot, and controversial though he is, I'm afraid I came to like him very much. He's the most remarkable man I think that I have met. I mean his here is a man who had survived the Holocaust, been fed out through a hole in the wall in the Krakow ghetto, had survived. His mother had been killed at Auschwitz and had then gone through and learned his craft as a filmmaker under the Communist regime and then gone to Hollywood and so on. So we had a lot to talk about and we got on very well. And as far as the events of the 1970s were concerned, I mean it was so far in the past, thirty years in the past, no one ever talked about it when I was working with him.

Presenter25:50

Yeah.

Robert Harris25:55

It sounds strange to say it, now that the controversy is reignited, but at that time it didn't seem an issue.

Presenter26:01

Just to remind people, of course, it it was charges of unlawful sex with a thirteen-year-old girl that he was charged with in America and had been unable to return to America since the charges had been brought.

Robert Harris26:05

It'll be a little bit more.

Presenter26:12

During the the final stages of production though, was that when he was finally arrested?

Robert Harris26:16

Yes, we we um we worked on the movie. I went and saw him in Paris at the beginning of September last year, and then two weeks later he was uh arrested and uh thrown into jail and the the movie sort of teetered on the edge of uh c collapse, but fortunately he'd got most of it done and the there was s a slight sense of unease by the Swiss who had arrested him. I mean he'd been a resident, he'd been flying going back and forth over the border for tw twenty or thirty years, so that they did actually allow him even a cutting room in the prison so that and the film editor came from Paris to work on the movie. It was a very surreal uh time.

Presenter26:55

Did he seem changed to you, given that you'd known him throughout the years when he wasn't being actively pursued?

Robert Harris27:01

I haven't detected too much of a change in it. It was very, very grim for his children and for his family, needless to say. And I think that was pretty traumatic. But he's a survivor. I mean, you know, he survived the Holocaust. He survived the terrible murder of his second wife, Sharon Tate. He's tough, you know.

Presenter27:22

Yeah.

Robert Harris27:22

Indeed. Let's have some use

Presenter27:23

Sick then, Robin, what are we gonna hear?

Robert Harris27:25

Yeah.

Robert Harris27:26

Well, I've talked about the difficulties for families of having a a writer under the roof, and it's al it was almost worse for my then girlfriend, now wife, Jill, who I met at the BBC. When we started going out, she thought she was just going out with a normal person, but instead of going on holidays or going out for the weekend, I would write. It was the only time I could do it, because I was working at the BBC at the time. There was a particular piece of music came out which she drew to my attention and has been our kind of piece of music ever since. And it's Elvis Costello, Every Day I Write the Book.

Speaker 328:03

Don't tell me you don't know what love is.

Speaker 328:08

You are old enough to know that

Speaker 328:13

You find strange hands in feel sweat

Speaker 328:20

Turns out to be a good note I'm a man with a mission in two or three editions and I'm giving you a long every day, every day.

Presenter28:35

Elvis Costello and Every Day I Write the Book. You you mentioned going into that, Robert Harris, that uh you and your wife, Jill Hornby, sort of think of that as your song. You met on a Newsnight. She was a producer. Do does that mean she has the same fascination with politics that you do?

Robert Harris28:49

Um yeah, she's interested in politics. Um yeah, we met on News Night the moment she came into the office. My interest was piqued and I managed to arrange for us to g s to go off together. Jim knocked his wife actually. Ellie Updale was the sort of editor of the day and I said is a possibility we could go off somewhere. And so we managed to get away from the market.

Presenter29:09

On assignment, yes.

Robert Harris29:10

On assignment, yes. And and and for some reason we went to interview Brian Sedgmore, then a Labour MP at the House of Commons. And so this was where I was able to make my number. And as we were driving back from the House of Commons, just

Presenter29:23

He's he's he's

Robert Harris29:24

No, he's a he's he's a strange Cupid, to put it mildly. But as we came back round uh the Hyde Park um in the taxi together, she says um that she realized we were going to get married. This she felt this not with any surge of optimism or delight, but merely as a sort of fact. Uh

Presenter29:44

And uh so it proved. Um she is the sister I say Jill Hornby, Jill Hornby people recognize as a columnist, um but she's also the the sister of Nick Hornby.

Presenter29:53

Writer of many successful books. I mean, I haven't totted up how many millions he's sold and how many millions you've sold. Have you bothered? Who who wins? I don't.

Robert Harris30:01

I think that would be good for family uh harmony. Uh it's been very odd when uh when I started going out with Jill, Nick was a teacher and not written a word of fiction or any kind of book. But it's been quite delightful, uh not least because of course we write about such completely different things. We have a good relationship.

Presenter30:21

Let's have some more music. What are we going to hear now?

Robert Harris30:23

Well this goes back again to Baroque music. You'll have noticed uh as I was thinking what r music I'd bring how kind of upbeat it all is. Um and uh this is something which isn't upbeat but is more profound. I I think it's one of the most beautiful pieces of music that I know and it does make one contemplate uh mortality, which is what it's supposed to do.

Presenter31:47

That was part of Antonio Lotti's Missa Sapiente with the Balthasar Newman Choir, an ensemble led by Thomas Hengelproch. Um your father lived to see your success then, Robert Harris. I'm wondering what did he make of it?

Robert Harris32:00

Uh I think he was um very pleased actually. I'm very sorry he didn't li live to see our two younger children um uh and I'm rather sorry he didn't live to see uh the Labour Party win in nineteen ninety seven. He would have enjoyed that election night I think, uh but he he lived long enough to see um both myself and my sister settled.

Presenter32:22

Um I read that you have a a taste for fine wine and fast cars, and we know you have a beautiful home, and indeed another in the in the south of France. What do you think the legacy of that?

Presenter32:31

Of your beginnings where you you talked about the Council House and and you know those sort of simple, straightforward beginnings.

Robert Harris32:38

Well, I remember my father when I finished Enigma I celebrated by getting a Jaguar and I took my father out for a drive in it and I wondered whether he'd think this was extravagant. And he said, on the contrary, he said it oh, this is great. You know, you've earned it. And that I liked that philosophy. And I've always tried to do my bit to help spend us out of a recession. It's it's certainly true. And I don't think that that's such a bad thing.

Presenter33:09

On this island, no twenty four hour news feeds, no newspapers, no blogs to read, no political discourse with other human beings. How on earth will you survive?

Robert Harris33:19

Well, I'd be quite happy to get away from the Internet, to be quite honest with you, and indeed the Twenty Four Hour News, because it is more and more being said about less and less, in my opinion. And it's hard these days to filter out from this mass of information coming to one what is worth listening to or reading. And that aspect of going to a desert island I think I would welcome. And I wish it was easier to just turn all this stuff off, but of course it is quite addictive.

Presenter33:49

Let's have some music then. Your final disc today is what?

Robert Harris33:52

Well, this is very appropriate. I did buy a house in the south of France in two thousand and three after I'd finished uh Pompeii because we have four children and I thought it would be a way of a feeble parental way of keeping seeing them if one had a place where they could we could all go on holiday. And I do love it down there and every time I go it's on the coast near Toulon this wonderful piece of music sums up for me these uh family holidays and it is the wonderful Charles Trenet La Mer.

Speaker 334:30

Hello, the better thing. I don't know what it calls me love.

Speaker 334:39

Yeah.

Speaker 334:44

Bear a cement curve.

Speaker 334:47

Who will have it?

Presenter34:55

That was Charles René and La Mer. And so The Bible, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, and one other book, Robert Harris. What's your book going to be?

Robert Harris35:03

Well this is tricky, to put it mildly. I I decided um that it would have to be something funny and uh I thought about Lucky Jim which is a book King by King Xiamis which I can read endlessly but then I thought no, the only thing I could take is Scoop which is uh remains the greatest portrait of uh our profession that's ever been written and uh I so I'd sit and read Scoop I think.

Presenter35:26

It's yours and a luxury, too, of course.

Robert Harris35:29

Well, here again there are so many to choose from. But I think I would like, if I could, to have a nightly hot bubble bath or fragrant berth of some sort, because I've found that there are few problems that don't seem better after a good hot bath.

Presenter35:47

Even being on your own on an island. It's yours. And if you had to choose just one disc to save, which one disc would it be?

Robert Harris35:54

I think because it brings back such a strong memory of a time in my life and of my wife, I would take the Elvis Costello every day I write the book.

Presenter36:06

Robert Harris, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Robert Harris36:09

Thank you, it's been a joy.

Presenter36:58

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio Four website bbc.co.uk slash Radio Four.