Paul Johnson

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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.

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

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My castaway this week is the writer and historian Paul Johnson. He writes, he says, out of a desire to put things right.

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More than fifty books and thousands of articles have flowed from his pen. Sweeping works about modernity, morality, art, and philosophy sit alongside fiercely opinionated biographies and essays.

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He's met countless Presidents and Prime Ministers. He asked Margaret Thatcher out on a date, dished out advice to Tony Blair, and, as a boy, asked Churchill the secret of his success.

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His opinions have provoked, offended, and enraged plenty of people over the years yet he says it was his mother who first suggested how he should form his thoughts. She said You should be like Jesus, and always be on the side of the poor. That's a very interesting piece of advice, Paul Johnson. Did you try to take it?

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I remember everything my mother said to me, and I've always tried to take her advice.

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And um when I failed it's because I didn't.

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She also believed that the world was divided into sheep and goats, and her sheep were very, very white, and her goats as black as pitch, you have written. Do you think we all really crave a world like that, where it's easy to define the difference between right and wrong?

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Uh well, of course, that's what you're taught. I mean, the most important thing in my life was being born a Catholic.

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And I was given a very good Catholic education by my parents, and then later by Dominican nuns, and above all the Jesuits at Stonyhurst, which was the boarding school I went to. They teach you the difference between right and wrong, and it's very clear.

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My mother would have liked me to have become a priest.

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But I like to be in the world and have fun. Your output is astonishing. You're in your early eighties now. How many words a day do you still write? Well, if I'm writing a a book, particularly a difficult book, I think five hours is as much as I can manage. I go on writing until I I'm tired. Right. You're not a a weekly columnist in the way that you were for so many years, particularly on the Daily Mail. But as you cast your eye over the coalition government and how they're handling things, what do you make of them?

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Well, they're doing better than I thought because, you know, they have to keep the votes of the Liberals, and Liberals are always a poison in the government liquid.

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On that note, we shall go to your first disc of the day. Tell me what we're going to hear, Paul. What's your first choice? Well, my first one is Ave Verum Corpus by Mozart. Corpus Christi is the great feast of transubstantiation, the great Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist. And we celebrated at school, not only by singing this, but we had a sovereign's guard of honour from the officer training corps of the school. And my last year at school I commanded this. And it formed up in front of the high altar.

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And at the moment of consecration we presented arms and gave the king's salute.

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Uh with fixed bayonets. Of course, you wouldn't get that nowadays, but in those days people took religion seriously.

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That was the Vienna Choir Boys singing Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra conducted by Helmut Froschauer.

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You are writing about Mozart, and you've also been writing about Darwin, about Socrates, these towering figures. Are you drawn towards greatness, do you think? Are you drawn towards trying to understand what it is that has made men great?

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Well, I write books to educate myself. I'm a very ignorant person, and if you write a book about somebody, you have to organise your reading very systematically, take notes, organize your thoughts, and so on. So you learn that way. So great men you write about. Do you aspire to greatness yourself? Do you have an idea of how you'd like to be remembered?

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No, I don't aspire to greatness because I did have a few years of power when I was an editor of the New Statesman in the nineteen sixties, and it was a very important paper in those days, and I found, at the end of six years, I really didn't enjoy power.

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And I think for that sort of greatness you have to enjoy power. Winston Churchill used to walk up and down the Cabinet room, clenching his fists and saying, I want them to feel my power.

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Well now, that sort of feeling is alien to me. And what about the power of your pen, then? Because throughout the years you've wreaked some havoc with the things that you've written. Don't you think that you have a very powerful tool? Yes, and I regret some of the things I wrote when I was a young man. I was very savage with poor Anthony Eden during the Suez War, and wrote my first book about it. I now know about the stresses under which politicians work, and he was a sick man for a lot of it. So I think I was unnecessarily cruel to him. And I very much regret that. You have an extraordinary recall for dates and facts and figures. And I know that you're a father of four children. I'm wondering if you could recite the dates of their birth. No, I can't. But what I can tell you about them was that I was present because we had them all at home at the birth of all four.

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And it's just as well because the last one I had to deliver myself. It was in the middle of the night, the baby was slow arriving, I sent the doctor home, he was tired, and then suddenly the baby arrived, so I had to deliver it myself. Can you tell me what happened? I mean, that was. Nothing happened. I just got the baby out, and then I phoned the doctor, and he came round.

Paul Johnson7:16

Yeah.

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And it was all fine. And was Marigold, your wife, fine? Wouldn't she? She did fine, yes, everything was fine. Did you find that that cemented your relationship uh even more or bound to.

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Bound to. Extraordinary. Let's have some more music then. We're on our second disc. What are we going to hear next? Uh well, this is a song by Tchaikovsky, uh, which my mother used to sing to me. She had a beautiful voice, and she taught me how to sing None But the Lonely Heart. And it's incredibly sad because Tchaikovsky led a very sad life and in the end he was forced to commit suicide by a court of honor because he'd made a pass at the Czar's nephew.

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So this is a sad song, but a really beautiful one.

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I quite would have no hope, yet none can hear it.

Paul Johnson8:17

Oh but the heart I loves your love.

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Uh

Paul Johnson8:34

Oh the

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Um

Paul Johnson8:35

Ah to my Lord.

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Behold.

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All my son from all my

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That was Leslie Garrett and None but the Lonely Heart. You said, Paul Johnson, going into that, that your mother used to sing that to you. Are you a good singer?

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I can be, but I've got a narrow range. I can't get the top notes. I I had a beautiful treble voice when I was a little boy.

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Let's go back then to life as a little boy. You were born in Manchester, in fact, in in nineteen twenty eight. Uh you moved when you were tiny to the the potteries. Tell me your your memories of those early years.

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Well, it was uh my mother didn't like it because it was full of soot. Because there used to be two thousand pot banks there, and they've all gone. There's one left in a museum. And these pot banks were I mean, they made a tar shaped, and that's where they baked the pots. And the sparks would come

Paul Johnson9:44

It made a butter shape.

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charging out of these bottle shaped things there were hundreds and hundreds of them right up into the sky, particularly at night time. And then you'd see all the pot banks firing away. So the whole thing was alive, and I used to watch this every night, every night of my life.

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Your mother was relatively old when she gave birth to you. She was forty three. You were the fourth of four children. W were you much doted upon? I was the fifth. Oh, I beg your pardon. Of five children. My sister died, so my mother was very glad.

Paul Johnson10:17

But five

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Tell

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Yeah.

Paul Johnson10:19

Map

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that I was born. And I was a companion to her, and she used to talk to me all the time, and she had a wonderful store of anecdotes and songs and Lancashire jokes and all those marvellous things. Can you describe the house you lived in? What was that like? It was a perfectly ordinary house. It was called Park View, Queen's Avenue, Tunstall.

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My father was the headmaster of an art school.

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and I used to go out painting with him. This was about nineteen thirty five. He said, Paul, you're quite talented, but don't become an artist when you grow up. I can see that bad times are coming for art.

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Frauds like Picasso are going to rule the Roos for the next fifty years, so do something else. You wrote a collection of uh essays. It was titled To Hell with Picasso. You still you still haven't come round to him then?

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No, of course not. I mean, I when I was fifteen I quite liked Picasso. But now I'm grown up.

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I like good art. I met him several times. I didn't like him at all. You met him? In Paris, yes, in Paris.

Paul Johnson11:23

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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And he used to say, Of course I am a joker.

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I am a joker. The people say I am a great artist like Michelangelo. I thought I don't. But he said I am a joker. That's what I am. I make jokes. And what about your own painting? Even though you followed your father's advice and you never took it up as a profession, you've always been a pain. I've always painted in watercolour. I'd try and do a painting every morning, immediately after breakfast.

Paul Johnson11:43

I've always painted.

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When you're painting watercolour, you have to concentrate every fibre of your being on what you're doing. So whatever worries you have, they're driven out of your mind by the art you're exercising. I'm interested that you say whatever worries you have. A man of eighty-three, what w worries do you have these days? They're the same sort of worries that you have, I imagine, you know. Getting on in life, um, health, money, children, grandchildren, just like anyone else. Yes, you're right, pretty much. You find exactly the same. And I wish the listener could see what a pretty girl you are in your beautiful polka dot blouse.

Paul Johnson12:19

Just like

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You will find a

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Pretty girl. I'm gonna relish that. It's a long time since I've been called a pretty girl. Let's uh go to the music then, Paul Johnson. We're on your third disc of the day. What are we gonna hear? Uh this is Hutch Leslie Hutchinson singing these foolish things. And why have you chosen this? Uh well, Leslie Hutchinson had the most wonderful voice. Uh it had a terrific range. The trouble was, he was so attractive, the ladies could never uh

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Leave him alone, they have more or less killed him.

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And still those little things remain.

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You might bring me happiness or pain

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Gardenia perfume lingering on a pillow Wild strawberries only seven francs a kilo

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And still my heart has wings

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Please for this thing remind me of you

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Uh

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Leslie Hutchinson Hutch and these foolish things. So your father, Paul Johnson, was an artist and he was an art teacher. Your father knew Lowry, is that right? Well, he and Lowry, I think, were at the Salford Art School together. Right. Yes. Of course, Lowry wasn't much considered in those days. He wasn't famous. And my father used to sell more paintings than he did. Really? And what did your father make of Lowry's art, given that he was quite opinionated about Picasso? He said, well, it's as best as he can do, and he does it very well within his limits. I think I liked it more than he did.

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And it's interesting that clearly your father was an opinionated man, and clearly, certainly within the the family, was quite outspoken. Do you think that's where you you got it from in the beginning?

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Well, yes,'cause I mean there was a lot of talking and argument in my family around the the lunch table and the dinner table.

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That's where I learnt so much. I'm very sorry that nowadays children and their parents don't have family meals together very much, because that's where I learnt everything in my childhood. Let's talk for a moment about the nowadays then. I mean, you you are known as I don't know if you like this phrase or not, but I read that the right-wing controversialist in chief I mean you very regularly have have railed against single mothers and the sexually permissive society and I wasn't always right-wing. I was twenty-five years member of the Labour Party. What happened? I revolted against that in the nineteen seventies because of the tr behaviour of the trades unions. They were ruining the country.

Paul Johnson14:48

But I wasn't always right.

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Driver.

Paul Johnson15:00

They were

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And then when Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Tory party, ousted that useless fellow Heath, I attached myself to her because she promised that she'd reform the unions, and by golly, she did too. But I wonder, when you listen to, as we have just recently, heard David Cameron standing up at Tory Party conference and saying we embrace gay marriage and we are an inclusive party and everybody has a place in society and many other politicians saying we must not penalise single mothers or lone parent families and so on do you ever feel like a man out of time that your views really now are the views of yesteryear? Well, no. I mean, the fact is, you know, I'm nearly eighty three. Time moves on.

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Time moves on and uh you can't always move with it. Um there's lots of things uh that Cameron does and says and believes that I don't particularly like. But he's entitled to his views and I don't want to stop progress. Well, that's interesting. Do you do you feel you quite like to to to rub up against the general consensus? Do you quite like being a little piece of grit in the oyster?

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I like both to be, in general, in agreement with what most people think. But I also like to be a little bit independent and individual, so I like to have a combination of the two. And thank God I've been allowed to do that all my writing life. Let's have some more music then, Paul Johnson. We're going to disc number four. What have you chosen and why? Well, this is Shirley Temple singing Animal Crackers in My Soup.

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She was one of the heroines of my childhood. My mother approved of her. She said she's a very good little girl, and you'll learn good manners from her. So I was allowed to see her movies. And then, as it happened, later on when she grew up and became, I think, a diplomat, I once had the privilege of meeting her. And she was absolutely adorable. And of course you have to remember that when she's singing this, she was only seven or eight.

Paul Johnson17:02

Animal crackers in my soup. Monkeys and rabbits make the loop. Gosh, okie, but I have fun swallowing animals one by one. In every bowl of soup I see. Lions and tigers watching me. I make them jump right through wahoop. Those animal crackers in my soup.

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That was Shirley Temple and Animal Crackers in My Soup from the nineteen thirty five film Curly Top. You were relishing every moment of that, Paul Johnson, really enjoying it. Um I mentioned in the introduction that you met Churchill when you were but a boy. Tell me how that came about. Well, he was it was nineteen forty six.

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And he was about to address the Tory Party conference in Blackpool. And I was allowed in his hotel at nine o'clock.

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I met him, shook hands, and I said I was a cheeky fellow in those days. In those days. I said, mister Winston Churchill, sir, to what do you attribute your success in life? And he answered immediately, Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down. And he then got into his limo.

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Interesting that you had the nerve even to speak to him. A lot of people I mean, given what a tearing figure he was at that point, a lot of people would have just clammed up and shaken his hand and then not said a word. Have you always had uh huge reserves of confidence? Uh yes, and then at school we did a lot of acting, you know. So I was full of bullions and self confidence.

Paul Johnson18:34

Ah, right.

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Um you were fourteen then when when your father died. Were you at boarding school while I didn't know he was ill. Uh it all happened very suddenly. It was the First World War. You see, he went right through the First World War.

Paul Johnson18:43

How did you get it?

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He was wounded several times. He was gassed, and I think in the Second World War he overexerted himself and it led to his heart attack. I was really getting to know him in the holidays before he died, and he was telling me all kinds of interesting things about his life and painting and what he thought and history and so forth. So it was a great blow to me. But I'm bound to say

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It's the only really tragic thing that's happened to me in my life. I've been very lucky on the whole. What do you think he wanted for you?

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Well, I think he wanted me to become a writer because he used to read little things I wrote. And I think he'd have liked to have been a writer himself. So I think he'd have been, on the whole, pleased with m uh my performance. Right. I I should tell there's so much that I I really need to telescope of your life. So I quickly want to run through a period of your life so as we can fit everything in. You ended up writing for The New Statesman, that was in Paris, and and there you knew Jean-Paul Satre and Albert Camus. You served in the King's Royal Rifles, that was for a couple of years. You studied at Oxford, C. S. Lewis, AGP Taylor were both teaching there at the time.

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And I said in the introduction that you you asked out well, it would have been Margaret Roberts then, of course, not Margaret Thatcher. You you did ask her out. I'm right about that.

Paul Johnson20:07

Yeah.

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Well, I asked her to come punting with me. She said, No, I'm not coming punting with you. You'll drive me into into the bushes. I've just had my hair done, and it'll get musked up.

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And that was that. You didn't try again? Yes. Very decisive lady.

Paul Johnson20:21

Try again.

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Indeed. You wrote speeches for her later on, and indeed gave her help not just in the writing, but in the delivering of those speeches. Well, that's very important. I never write speeches for anyone unless they will rehearse it with me. I used to give her advice. I said

Paul Johnson20:30

Well

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There are three important things that a government must do, because nobody else can do them external defence, internal order, and running an honest currency.

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Anyway, she liked this. People said she didn't listen. Not true. If she thought what you said was worth hearing, she'd not only listen, she'd write it down. She wrote it down. She had a notebook in her handbag. And then years later, being Margaret, she suddenly said to me, You know, Paul, let me tell you something very interesting. There are three things the government must do, and it all came out together. Have have you ever had political ambition yourself?

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No. I once or twice I was asked to present myself as a potential candidate in a s selection committee, but I decided I didn't like it. And I've known politicians all my life, and the trouble is I find them very boring, really, if you have to mix with them all the time. Let's have some more music then. What are we going to hear next, Paul Johnson? Oh, the piano accordion. The piano accordion is really the essential instrument of France. And of course, it was General de Gaulle's favourite instrument.

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I once uh interrupted de Gaulle at a press conference. He was talking about Europe and he was saying, For me it's not an economic thing at all, it's a cultural thing. Pour moi, Europe, et Europe, de Dante, de Goethe, et de Chateaubriand and I interrupted and said, Hey, the Shakespeare mon general and he looked at me with absolute fury and then shrugged his shoulders and said, We, Shakespeare au si.

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That was the theme to Maigret composed by Ron Greiner. So, Paul Johnson, your books sell incredibly well. They stay in print, which is a rare thing. Why do you think your history books sell as well as they do? What's their appeal? Well, I think people love history. History is wonderful. It's been my life, really. And I try and convey to the reader the enthusiasm and love and interest I find in history. You were for many years, of course, a columnist on the Daily Mail. For people who haven't partaken of your columns over the years, I should give them something of flavour. You said Khrushchev was a sinister clown, Nehru a consummate humbug. You defended Nixon. You said JFK was a sham. You praised General Pinochet for his economic strategy. But you said you don't fall for the hype about Nelson Mandela. Now explain that, the hype about Nelson Mandela.

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Well, I didn't think very much of him, frankly. Pinochet I like because he saved Chile from civil war.

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Nixon, I thought, was badly treated. I got to know him quite well, and he was a very remarkable man. He was the most of all the great leaders I've met, he was the most anxious to acquire knowledge. And he went on doing that. I saw him just a fortnight before he died. So, you know, I judge people by what I think is right. You've been on the sharp end of the newspapers yourself. A fair time ago, there was an article about your personal life claiming that you'd had an affair for many years. Where do you think the line lies between prurience in the papers and exposing things that are important or hypocritical? Well, I think it is you have to draw a distinction between people who run for public office and those who don't. I think if you go for public office, to some extent, your private life has to be in the public domain. Of course, people would say

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With some justice, that if you write for popular newspapers, it's rather like running for public office. So, anyway, you have to take what is offered in life, and I've had a few bruises delivered on me, some of them true, some of them untrue, and I accept that for what it is. And what about? Because one of the things that annoys people about you is that you often do take a very moralizing tone. You talk about the sanctity of marriage, and you talk about the fact that abortion is wrong, and you talk about how people should run their relationships. And on the other hand, if they're to read it and believe the things that were printed about you, they'd say, well, this is simple. Yeah, but most of them weren't true, you see. So that's the difference. But no, I do, I have in the past, less so nowadays.

Paul Johnson25:21

Oh, but magical.

Paul Johnson25:24

So

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Taken a high moral line. I think there's an awful lot that's wrong with our present-day society, and that is due to some extent by a low sense of public morality. And I think.

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Nine out of ten of the people listening to this programme would agree with what I've just said. Yes, but what about practising what you preach? I think one should practise what you preach, and I have always tried to do so, not always successfully.

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Let's have some more music, shall we? Tell me about the next disc then. We're on disc number six. This is what I think the best short record ever made. It's Patsy Klein singing Crazy. I hate pop music, but I love a popular song well sung. Here is a superb song, brilliantly performed by a gifted singer, and technically an outstanding recording. Crazy.

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I'm crazy for feeling

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So lonely

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I was crazy.

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Crazy for feeling

Paul Johnson26:45

Uh

Paul Johnson26:46

So can I

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That was Patsy Klein and Crazy. And you said, Paul Johnson, you don't go in much for pop music, but that's one you're willing to make an exception for. Um I'm very interested in the redoubtable Marigold. Tell me more about her. You've been married for more than fifty years.

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Uh she's a very clever girl. Used to be uh head girl of Bennandon School, went to Oxford and all that. She's a very good literary critic. She used to review books for the um

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Times Literary Supplement. Is it true that she tackled an intruder in your house? Yes, she did, and got him arrested. Helped by our next door neighbour.

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And he was I've never seen a man so terrified in my life.

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I had had a hip operation and was totally mobile. We'd been out in the early evening, we'd been to a party.

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And when we got into our house in the kitchen, she said, I can hear something going on upstairs. So I said, Oh, don't go up. It might be a burglar or something. Of course I'm going up. Anyway, it was a burglar. And I heard a voice saying, What are you doing in my bedroom? Get out of here, you impudent fellow, you see. And then this very frightened man came running down the stairs and out, and our next-door neighbour collared him and caught him, and he got three years. Amazing. I mean, a lot of people might have considered that a foolish thing to do to tackle a burglar. No, no, I don't think it was. I think burglars are usually more scared than you. I'd have done the same if I'd been mobile. We were talking earlier about Margaret Thatcher and the fact that you wrote speeches for her and helped her with her delivery of those speeches. She did have, of course, a terrifying reputation for handbagging people in her cabinet. Did she ever terrify you? No.

Presenter28:26

No, no, we always got on very well, and still do, though she's not very well. A year or so ago I took her to see the present Pope, Pope Benedict the Sixteenth, which she en enjoyed very much. So we've we've always got on well together, partly because um well, particularly now, poor Dennis, whom she misses dreadfully. I remember Dennis's jokes, and I remind her of Dennis's jokes, and she loves hearing his old jokes, like, you know, when he couldn't bear underdone beef. And if he was given underdone beef in a restaurant, he'd send it back. My goodness, he said, I can almost hear it mooing.

Presenter29:04

Let's have some music, Paul Johnson. We're on your seventh disc of the day. George Formby singing When I'm Cleaning Windows. When I was a little boy, we lived on the Fyld. He lived at Anstill. Of course, he was the most famous entertainer in Britain. This was in the thirties. Everyone knew him. He used to go for little walks by himself, and occasionally I'd run into him. Once he gave me sixpence, which was a lot of money in those days. He's a generous man. And my mother, who disapproved of him, she said he's a very vulgar, low-down comedian. Everything he says is a double blante. I didn't know what that meant, but I knew it was wicky. And I was never allowed to hear when I'm cleaning windows at home, but it's still a jolly good song and he sings it very well.

Speaker 229:49

Now I go cleaning windows to earn an honest ball.

Speaker 229:54

For a nosy parker it's an interesting job. Now it's a job that just suits me. A window cleaner you would be if you can see what I can see. When I'm cleaning windows, funny moonin' couples too. You should see them bill and coo. You'd be surprised at things they do. When I'm cleaning windows.

Presenter30:15

George Formley, and when I'm cleaning windows from one cheeky chaffy to another, you were having a good old chortle throughout that, Paul Johnson. Um you said that you still write every day. How how many words do you aim to write each day? Do you have a goal?

Presenter30:29

No, I don't, but I c I can write up to five thousand. Jean Paul Sartre, whom I knew when I lived in Paris, could write twenty thousand words in a day.

Paul Johnson30:33

Don't

Presenter30:38

Of course, he was writing in French. What did you make of Sartre? I didn't think much of his opinions, and of course he was a very ugly little man. But he was generous. I was once having lunch at a rather expensive restaurant as a treat, with my girlfriend. He was sitting at the next table. I didn't know him very well, but uh we exchanged a few words, and lo and behold, when my bill came, he took it, insisted on paying it. Very generous man. That is very unusual among intellectuals, especially left wing ones.

Presenter31:11

You fitted it all in there, didn't you? Um and so you're still writing up to five thousand words a day. You're still painting, as we know. You say you like to paint every morning birds or flowers and so on.

Presenter31:21

I'm wondering, given that you've doled out the criticism, how good are you at taking it? I know Brian Sewell, the art critic, was I mean more than unkind when he was writing about your work. He said that it had nothing of the slightest merit to be seen in it. Does that sting?

Presenter31:34

Well, you know, I see Brian in Sheila's bookshop in Notting Hill and uh

Presenter31:39

I'm quite capable of putting him in his place too, so I don't care what he writes about me, and I don't think much of his opinions on art, though they're by no means so stupid as those of most critics.

Presenter31:52

It's about is it thirty odd years since your mother died now? A long time. But she did she lived to see you make a great success of your writing public. Well, she lived into her nineties, yes.

Paul Johnson31:56

But

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And uh I was present at her deathbed.

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And I said to my mother, Well, you won't be long for purgatory.

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You'll be up there in no time because you've never done anything wrong in your life. And she said.

Presenter32:17

I've often criticised the clergy.

Presenter32:20

Was that it? I think those were her last words. What did she make of your writing? I mean, given that the worst thing she had ever done was criticise the the clergy, did she find the acerbic writing and the criticism that you doled out difficult to take?

Presenter32:34

No, I don't think so. I mean, my my mother was a very broad minded woman. She had very strong principles but she was always prepared to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, and I wish I had inherited from her her wonderful sense of tolerance.

Presenter32:52

Interesting that you didn't. I mean, given that you respected her so much, why don't you think you tried harder? Well, you can't, you know. Virtues are very difficult to acquire. All my life I have been impatient. All my life I have struggled against impatience, because it leads to all kinds of things like bad temper and so forth. And I still struggle against it. How does Marigold deal with your temper? Does she tick you off, or she just Yes, of course. All wives tick off all husbands. and to some extent vice versa.

Presenter33:24

Let's have some more music, shall we? Tell us what we're going to hear. Disc number eight. This is my view of life. It's called Look for the Silver Lining.

Presenter33:32

And curiously enough, I once sang this on the BBC. I'd written something saying that in the old days politicians used to hold sing songs after the end of the day's work. And I said, you know, we ought to have more sing songs. There ought to be more singing in life. So they asked me to talk about it on the Today programme. I wanted to sing. Look for the silver lining. And they tried to stop me. But John Humphreys said, No, if he wants to sing it, let him sing it. So I did.

Presenter34:02

Look for the silver lining Whene'er a cloud appears in the blue I sing it at that speed

Paul Johnson34:11

Look for

Paul Johnson34:15

The silver.

Speaker 234:19

Mm.

Presenter34:20

Whene'er a cloud appears

Speaker 234:26

There's a model.

Speaker 234:30

Remembers some way the sun is shining

Presenter34:37

Funny

Presenter34:40

That was Margaret Whiting singing Look for the Silver Lining. So, Paul, we come to the point where I'm going to give you a copy of the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and you're allowed to take one other book. What will you take to the island? I take an atlas. I love atlases. And of course, an atlas can allow you to travel, in your imagination, all over the world. It's yours, then, a big atlas. And a luxury, too. What would you take to make life a little more bearable? Well, if I was allowed to take my watercolour paints and lots of paper, I'd never be bored. Well, you can. A lifetime supply of paper to go with your watercolours, too. And if you had to pick just one from the eight tracks that you've chosen today, which one track would you choose to save? I think I'd I'd I'd take the last. Well, Look for the Silver Lining is yours then. Paul Johnson, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Presenter35:31

Thank you.

Presenter36:08

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website: bbc.co.uk slash Radio Four.