Lisa Jardine

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.

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

Presenter0:34

My castaway this week is Professor Liza Jardine.

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Historian, biographer, public thinker, mathematician, her proclivities are wide ranging, and her work very well regarded, with prize winning books on subjects as diverse as Sir Christopher Wren, Seventeenth Century Holland, Erasmus, and Women in the Time of Shakespeare. Her current day job is directing the Centre for Lives and Letters at University College London. If that seems a little ivory tower for your tastes, think again. As chair of the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, for many years she was at the sharp end of the complex conundrums and high emotion that surround the artificial creation of life, leading the world in developing the legal framework that governs IVF treatment.

Presenter1:20

Her rigour and originality, then, are greatly admired, and both seem to have been in evidence since the beginning. Her schoolgirl contemporaries had pictures of Elvas by their beds, but Lisa had other ideas not for her the snake hipped king of rock and roll. No, as a teenager, she gazed lovingly at a photo of a brilliant, albeit handsome, Indian mathematician.

Presenter1:40

She says, I only do things I love, and I love everything I do. Welcome, Professor Lisa Jardine. Thank you for having me. Being an original thinker who ranges across so many subjects very knowledgeably and in such great depth must surely require a huge amount of focus and energy. Do you ever flag?

Lisa Jardine1:47

I have it

Lisa Jardine2:01

I didn't used to flag. I you know, everybody has to admit that when they pass sixty they begin to flag a little. It isn't exactly the capaciousness. I have a kind of thing which I think is hardwired and I know other people who have it, which is a kind of brain filing system, where I kind of can hear my brain running through the file cards to get to the one that has the information I need. So it doesn't have any more information that anybody else has. They're just probably more cards.

Presenter2:29

And do you speak I've read uh just keep me right on this, would you French, Italian, Dutch, Greek, Ancient Greek, Latin, and a bit of Hebrew? Not so good at Ancient Greek. I'm not g I'm not going to test you.

Presenter2:40

You've just been made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society. You've won lots of different awards throughout your working life. It's easy to say, Oh, they don't matter, it's the work, you know but actually that public acknowledgment of somebody who has hit high benchmarks how enjoyable is that genuinely for you.

Lisa Jardine2:55

It knocked me for six. Did it? It is the accolade of all accolades.

Presenter2:58

Do you actually have a sort of, you know, a gong, a medal, something to look at?

Lisa Jardine3:02

I get presented on the tenth of July, so I don't know yet.

Presenter3:06

Will you polish it and keep it somewhere uh obvious? Oh my god, I'll wear it in bed.

Presenter3:12

When you've had an imagined future cast away on this island and you've chosen your music, what's been your basis for the choices we're going to hear today?

Lisa Jardine3:20

They're very emotional. I mean, your introduction makes me a rather cerebral person. I think the reason I've had the life I had is I am the most emotional person. When I listen to some of my choices here, I cry.

Presenter3:32

I'm so interested to hear you say that, because indeed, as I've been doing the research on you, the one thing that has struck me is the cerebral nature of your public image. You seem to me somebody who if I say clinical, I mean that in the best possible way, incredibly incisive and somebody who is able to stand back. And yet you're telling me that there is a very distinctly a whole other side to the the life you've lived.

Lisa Jardine3:55

I'm Jewish, so it couldn't possibly not be. And the thing is women have to come across as cerebral if they're to be taken seriously. It's shocking, but they do. You know. If I were Sir Paul Nurse, the wonderful President of the Royal Society, I could cry at a public meeting and everyone would go, Oh, what a dear. If I were me and cried at a public meeting, they'd say, She not really up to it, is she?

Presenter4:17

Let's hear your first piece of music, Professor Lisa Jardina. What is this, and why have you picked it?

Lisa Jardine4:22

It's my theme tune.

Lisa Jardine4:25

I always wanted to be Annie Lennox. I still want to be Annie Lennox. I wore a red crew cup for a number of years. It's me, right? And the words are absolutely me.

Speaker 44:36

I tell myself too many times why don't you river learn to keep your big mouth shut?

Speaker 44:46

That's why it hurts so bad to hear the words that keep on falling from your mouth.

Speaker 44:57

Calling from your mouth.

Speaker 45:02

Calling from your mind.

Speaker 45:06

Tell me

Speaker 45:08

Uh

Presenter5:11

That was Annie Lennox and why you were enjoying all of that, Professor Lisa Jardine, but I noticed your your eyebrows sort of pricked up, especially at the line, I tell myself too many times, why don't you ever learn to keep your big mouth shut?

Lisa Jardine5:22

That's me.

Lisa Jardine5:24

I've never learned that.

Presenter5:25

I've never learned that.

Lisa Jardine5:28

That's the wonderful thing about being an older woman.

Lisa Jardine5:31

I can say what I like, and I do. What do you tell your young students, your young female students? Behave badly. Do you?

Presenter5:36

To behave

Lisa Jardine5:38

I have a badge that I give them. It has the woman sign on.

Lisa Jardine5:41

And it says behave badly, and I tend to recommend they wear it on the back of their lapel at their interviews, but that they not forget its message.

Presenter5:49

Given your generation, you would be, I'm imagining, at so many points in your career, not just the most senior woman in a room, but possibly the only woman in a room. How have you dealt with that over the years? Have you had

Presenter6:03

Policy for how you conduct yourself in in terms of behaving badly.

Lisa Jardine6:06

Well, I give to every woman listener the advice I was given by a great woman professor of philosophy when I was a mere grad student. And she said, When you get into a room and you are the only woman, make sure your voice is heard first in the room. Ask for a glass of water, ask for a window open, say, Has anybody got a pen? Because your voice has to be heard in the room because its pitch and timbre is so different from the men that otherwise it will startle and disorientate people when you finally speak.

Presenter6:38

April, nineteen forty four, then, was when you were born the first of four sisters and, as I understand it, you were quite literally born into academia. It was Ruskin College, Oxford.

Lisa Jardine6:48

It was

Presenter6:49

Tell me about the circumstances.

Lisa Jardine6:50

It was of course wartime, but Ruskin College had been turned into the maternity hospital for during the war. We lived just outside in the country in a cottage with only cold running water. I was born there in Ruskin, and my mother said that many years later, when she went to hear my father speak at Ruskin, she got the giggles because he was standing exactly where she had had to undress for antenatal examinations.

Presenter7:15

It comes across when I read about you that you were the sort of um typical, overachieving, studious, dutiful eldest of four. How did you get on with your three little sisters? Were they similar?

Lisa Jardine7:28

Well, first let me say I was utterly obnoxious. I was fat, I was pleased with myself, my parents listened to everything I said, I was a quote prodigy mathematician.

Presenter7:40

Yes, by five, is that right?

Lisa Jardine7:41

You have been designated as well.

Presenter7:41

You have been designated as

Lisa Jardine7:44

Horrible But my adorable sisters love me to pieces. You know, what more can I say? We are bonded in a way. For all my horrors they still seem to love me.

Presenter7:55

Let's have your second piece of music. Tell me about this. Why have you chosen this second piece?

Lisa Jardine8:00

When I was in my mid-teens and at Cheltenham Ladies' College with my best friend Anna Ross, who went on to become a professional oboist, music was actually classical music, quite the centre of our life. And Anna had been to the Royal Festival Hall and heard Jacqueline Dupre play aged 16. She was a year younger than us. But at 17, we understood that a young woman could blow the world away.

Presenter9:30

part of the first movement of Elgar's cello concerto performed by Jacqueline Dupre with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted there by Sir John Barberaly. So, Professor Lisa Jardini, one of very few castaways who's been on this programme, whose parent has also been castaway, in your case

Speaker 19:43

Mm-hmm.

Presenter9:45

Your father was the scientist and broadcaster doctor Jacob Brunowski, a great intellectual, an academic, best known probably to the public at the time for his nineteen seventy three television series, The Ascent of Man.

Presenter9:59

People knew him as that. You knew him as your father. As a a little child, what were your memories of him as a dad?

Lisa Jardine10:05

Well, he was a looming figure, but interestingly, the more I think about it today, the more my image of my father was also the media image. I

Lisa Jardine10:16

I always used to say to people that the father at home was the same as the one on radio and television. I now wonder if that was true. Now I've actually begun to do a bit of biographical work on him. He loomed so large in my life that it's hard to convey it, really. I adored him, and it was, I think, pretty mutual.

Presenter10:36

So your mother had four daughters then. She was an artist and a sculptor. And you yourself have written in an essay about the conflicting demands of a creative and a domestic life, and I'm wondering how she dealt with those demands.

Lisa Jardine10:39

Yes, you're a sculptor.

Lisa Jardine10:49

Well, she just rolled over and was a doormat. She was a very accomplished sculptor, but she only did little bits of tinkering around once she had the children. And she gave herself over to us, as a result of which I can't even remember what she looked like, because she was always there. And I

Lisa Jardine11:11

aged nine or ten, that I could not be like that. What was I going to do, given that I had the daddy side of the abilities I was not prepared to give up, but I wanted a loving life.

Presenter11:23

But here's the thing: you were bright enough as a nine-year-old to look at your mother, and I think probably this would be common to a lot of us as nine, ten, eleven-year-olds, and think, well, I'm not going to do it that way.

Presenter11:32

Then we find ourselves in a set of circumstances where we think, Oh my god, I'm doing it that way. So, how did you manage to not do that?

Lisa Jardine11:39

Well, I married a very clever man who had not the slightest idea of domesticity, and it lasted ten years, and then I pretty well collapsed on it. We're still very good friends. I still admire him, but I couldn't do it. And I had several years as a single mum, and do you know what, it was easier.

Presenter11:56

Let's have some more music. We're on your third. Tell me why you've chosen this.

Lisa Jardine12:00

Well, I've chosen this'cause I dislike it.

Lisa Jardine12:03

Well, I'm I'm intrigued. My father was German speaking before he came to Britain, and I thought he disliked music. I particularly did because the only thing he would play on the gramophone was Kurtweil and Bertold Brecht's operas sung by Lottie Lenya, whose voice I deplored. And he said he was tone deaf and he said he didn't really like music, but this was cerebral. And then from his desert island discs, which of course I listened to, I discovered for the very first time that his father had been cantor in the synagogue in Wodz in Poland, had a beautiful singing voice, and that my father had been at home when great young tenors from the German opera, when they moved to Germany, had come and sung in the house. So that, as it were, operatic music was in his blood, but there was no way he ever acknowledged it to us.

Speaker 413:00

Unta hi fish deratse undi treg derim gesi.

Speaker 413:10

Oh my kids

Speaker 413:20

Annam Schulen Blau and Sontak Ligtan Totar Manam Strend Undan Menschondie Meserdent Und Schmuel Maya Blai Fer Schwunden Und Samancha

Presenter13:55

And I

Speaker 413:58

Yeah.

Presenter13:59

That was Molly Tat von Mackimesser from Court Files' The Thruppenny Opera, sung by Lottie Lenya, in an arrangement by Turk Murphy, who was also playing the trombone with Louis Armstrong and his All Stars.

Presenter14:09

So you said very honestly, much earlier on in our conversation, that you were you know, pretty obnoxious as a child. Did you have it in your mind that brilliance was just, you know, a few steps ahead of you, and that it was yours for the taking?

Lisa Jardine14:24

Yes.

Presenter14:24

You went to Cheltham Ladies' College on a scholarship, and you were taught there, as I understand it, by teachers who all had first degree uh in maths uh at their fingertips, and so you were taught intensely and at a very high level. Did you enjoy it?

Lisa Jardine14:38

Yeah.

Lisa Jardine14:39

At Cheltenham I loved the maths. I also of course loved being the little girl who everybody pointed out in the corridors and said, Mummy says if I can beat her in the maths test I get a new bicycle.

Presenter14:51

Right, and did anyone ever beat you?

Lisa Jardine14:53

Yeah.

Presenter14:56

And your mother and father would say what to you about your work? Would were they always striving for you to do better?

Lisa Jardine15:04

No. They were the classic, all enveloping Eastern European Jewish family. I was the most beautiful girl, I was the most clever girl, and but we all were, all four of us were.

Presenter15:16

And what about outside the classroom then when you when your brain wasn't applied to mathematics and the other disciplines? What what were you interested in? I had a crush on the captain

Lisa Jardine15:25

of the hockey team.

Presenter15:26

Yeah.

Lisa Jardine15:26

So

Presenter15:26

Uh

Lisa Jardine15:26

Maybe let her.

Presenter15:26

Yeah.

Lisa Jardine15:26

Yeah.

Presenter15:26

Uh

Lisa Jardine15:27

She was blonde, she was buxom, she was um a real Joan Hunter Dunn figure. It sort of tells you that somewhere in my unconscious I didn't want to be the person I really was.

Presenter15:38

Rise, and tell me when did you take up guitar?

Lisa Jardine15:41

Around ten I became rather good. Everything I tried I had to exceed. I don't think I was a good musician, not compared with my friend Anna, but I did become an accomplished player and won competitions. And I only stopped playing the guitar seriously as a classical guitarist in about my second year at Cambridge. And then I just didn't have time to practise, you know. And I began to play folk songs and I I actually bussed my way round Greece playing Joan Byers folk songs and uh I loved that. And there are pictures of me with black hair down to my waist and you looking really sultry with my guitar.

Presenter16:21

Tell me about your next piece of music, then. What are we going to hear? We're on your fourth.

Lisa Jardine16:25

We are going to hear something quite different. It's part of a massenet so-called ballet Manon because it's from the first act. It's again very romantic, you know. I'm such a romantic at heart. And the story behind it is that two very distinguished women, authors, took me to see Sylvie Guillem dance Manon in the best seats at the Royal Opera House, so I'd never seen ballet that close. And I was completely, completely love struck with Sylvie Guillem, and actually with Manon. And what it brought back to me, because for many years I had not

Lisa Jardine17:04

been to ballet was that in my early teens I had queued overnight at the Royal Opera House to get my mother tickets in the gods, and then I went with her when the Balshoy came to London,'cause my mother was a mad ballet fan.

Speaker 417:58

Uh

Presenter18:26

Part of the bedroom duet from Act One of the Ballet Manon, based on Massnet's opera performed by the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, conducted by Richard Boeing. So tell me, Professor Lisa Giardini, you went to Cambridge, unsurprisingly. You were nineteen when your parents emigrated to America with your two younger sisters, so so you and Judith, the second daughter, were left at home.

Presenter18:48

And it was then, I understand it, that your love affair with Maths came to a crashing end. Tell me what happened.

Presenter18:53

How was

Lisa Jardine18:54

Good enough.

Presenter18:54

Yeah.

Lisa Jardine18:54

At University Maths. Bottom line. Very interesting really. Some of it had to do with gender bias. Um really. Newnham told me that I could never be as good as a mathematician as a man.

Presenter19:08

There were 180 students and there were only nine female students. Yeah, I think so. That's right, yeah.

Lisa Jardine19:11

Yeah, I think so. That's right. Yeah. They told you that specifically. Yeah, right. And I rushed off and telephoned my father and said, is this true? And he was.

Presenter19:15

Right.

Lisa Jardine19:21

Absolutely livid. It was the first time in my life at my women's college that I was told I couldn't match a man.

Presenter19:28

I mean, you've been two things that are considered very un-British. You've been very straightforward about how clever uh you were as a little girl and you you seem very very comfortable with that and it's something that you know not just as a as a Brits but as a female you know we slightly shy away from saying those sort of things. Was there anything of the shock at not being top?

Lisa Jardine19:49

An absolute collapse. And actually, I think everyone who is deemed clever has that at some point in their life. And it's good for them.

Lisa Jardine19:59

It is cathartic. It clears your mind of any idea that

Lisa Jardine20:04

People are going to get bicycles if they beat you.

Lisa Jardine20:07

And it also teaches you to deal with failure.

Presenter20:10

And what happened to you at the time, then? You you reacted by by ch switching subjects?

Lisa Jardine20:14

I did. Was that the right thing to do? Probably not.

Lisa Jardine20:18

I switched in the final year of my degree. I then got a very good degree by switching to English, can you believe it?

Lisa Jardine20:24

But I shouldn't have I should have finished the maths degree and then moved.

Presenter20:27

At the time, did you manage to divine any note of disappointment in your father's reaction? I mean, there he he was, the man that he was, with the five-year-old he had that was destined to be a maths prodigy, saying, Well, that's it, I'm not interested, going to do English.

Lisa Jardine20:43

I didn't say I'm not interested. I said, I can't do this. And his response was.

Presenter20:45

Right.

Lisa Jardine20:48

Self-chastisement for not having seen that earlier.

Presenter20:53

Mr President, just moving away for a moment from the purely academic endeavours whilst you were at university to I mean you were there at a crucial and fascinating time in British sort of social history. There you were at the beginning of the the sixties, going into the mid sixties. It's it's very easy when you know when we look w with the benefit of distance at these moments to say, Well, that was a time of great societal shift. When you were in the middle of it, did it feel that something tangible, textural, was changing about the world?

Lisa Jardine21:22

That side of my life was wonderful. I was very active in politics. I was very active in the Labour Club. I've been a member of the Labour Party ever since then. I rose to be, I can't remember, Secretary or Vice President. I was a girl. I couldn't be President. And the whole thing was magic being at Cambridge then. I was footloose and fancy-free. My parents were abroad. And were you badly behaved?

Presenter21:48

In a good way. What about the sex and drugs and rock and roll?

Lisa Jardine21:51

No. No drugs. I've always believed that my mind was sacrosanct. Not going to play with that. Sex, well, you know, it was contraception. We you know, we girls, as you will learn from novels of the period, we had contraception. We were that generation. It was brilliant.

Presenter22:09

Let's have some more music. Tell me then, of course, about this your

Lisa Jardine22:12

Your fifth Uh

Lisa Jardine22:13

Well, Bob Dylan came on us like a crash of thunder. It was 1963 when Free Wheeling came out. I remember rushing out to buy it and I still own the copy with that extraordinary photograph of him on the front, black and white photograph. The songs were so relevant to the whole Cold War threat of the bomb that we were living under. He spoke it to us direct, and this voice, I just couldn't ever get the voice out of my head. I've been out in front of

Speaker 422:45

Of a dozen dead oceans.

Speaker 422:50

I've been ten thousand miles and a mouth of a graveyard.

Speaker 422:56

And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard rain gonna fall.

Presenter23:12

Bob Dylan, a hard rain's gonna fall. You got married then, Lisa Jardin, to fellow academic Nick Jardin at twenty-five. And for this politically aware

Presenter23:22

Highly intelligent, not to say intellectual, young woman You you decided to change your name in the mid sixties to Jardine. Why was that?

Presenter23:30

I'd been pus

Lisa Jardine23:31

Teud

Presenter23:32

Uh

Lisa Jardine23:32

All my life by Bronowski, my second name.

Lisa Jardine23:36

I only had to write a check, and somebody said,'Oh, are you doctor Bronofsky's daughter?

Presenter23:40

Because of his great television.

Lisa Jardine23:40

Because of his great television series and his books and his presence, his radio, the Brains Trust on radio, and he'd done on television. And I I didn't want it. You know, much as I loved him and admired him, I was me and I was making my own career. So I with alacrity took Nick Jardine's name.

Presenter23:58

So you had ten years of marriage then, you had two young children, and it came to the point where you and your first husband divorced.

Presenter24:08

For most people just sort of concentrating on paying the gas bill and managing at least to try and iron a couple of shirts every week might be enough. Y you continued throughout that period to have a very intense academic career.

Presenter24:21

It seems like such an obvious question how the hell did you do it, but how the hell did you do it?

Lisa Jardine24:26

Child care at home.

Lisa Jardine24:28

is the answer. I couldn't have done it otherwise. I couldn't have done it boxing and coxing to nurseries and playgroups, which my daughter does. I had a full time nanny. I had the same full time nanny from when Rachel was born in nineteen seventy six to when Sam, my youngest, went off to secondary school.

Presenter24:45

Let's have some more music, uh, Lisa Jardine. Um, tell me about this, your sixth of the morning.

Lisa Jardine24:51

Talking Heads

Lisa Jardine24:52

Once in a lifetime.

Lisa Jardine24:54

is a sort of monument to actually a quite big change in my life when I met and then married my second husband. He was into sort of what I'd call cerebral pop. I'd never really listened to pop music. Talking Heads was a band I discovered with my husband John Hare. David Byrne, the singer, was my absolute idol for many years from the 80s. In fact, last Sunday I found myself in the British Airways lounge at JFK and when I looked up and asked if anybody could tell me the password for that Wi-Fi, the man sitting opposite me said cheerily, Budapest. And I looked at it and it was David Byrne. And I sat there for the next half hour just looking at David Byrne, who is as gorgeous and glorious as he ever was.

Speaker 425:41

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shop.

Speaker 425:46

And you may find yourself

Speaker 425:48

In another part of the world, and you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile.

Speaker 425:55

You may find yourself in a beautiful house.

Speaker 425:59

With a beautiful light!

Speaker 426:01

And you may ask yourself, well

Speaker 426:04

How did I get here?

Speaker 426:13

The rapper is to the

Presenter26:16

That was Talking Heads and Once in a Life Time. Um Professor Lisa Charitine, everything I read about you, the word indomitable seems to crop up.

Speaker 426:23

Yeah.

Speaker 126:24

Uh

Presenter26:25

Do you like that word? Are you snorting that? How is that derivative? You like it. Yes, and meeting you today, what I was going to say is I can see absolutely why.

Speaker 126:27

You like it.

Presenter26:33

I want to take you to the point it was 2004, I think, when you were diagnosed with breast cancer. What do you remember of that time?

Lisa Jardine26:42

Shock was the first response. I wasn't ill, didn't feel ill, but I had regular check-ups for breast cancer. The collapse of all that structure that held everything together for us and discovering that my husband was a

Lisa Jardine27:03

You know, Princess Diana would have called him a rock. He was just I'd have fallen through if it hadn't been for him. But he made me pick myself up. He was quite f firm with me. Made me pick myself up and said, We'll get through this, we get through everything else. And I believed him. I still believe him. And we carried on. We didn't stop anything.

Presenter27:23

What do you mean you didn't stop anything?

Lisa Jardine27:25

I fitted the

Lisa Jardine27:26

Surgery and the treatments and the illness.

Lisa Jardine27:32

Like having had the children, actually. You fitted the work in round all of that.

Presenter27:37

Was there any point where you thought actually Indomitable as I am, even I must now stop?

Lisa Jardine27:44

Not then. When I had a recurrence later, I think I reacted differently.

Presenter27:49

Right. And what happens, aside from the physical aspects of dealing with the difficulty of being that ill the mental side of being somebody who is a sort of supercharged human being, who does all the things that you do and has handled it and juggled it mentally, how have you

Presenter28:09

Readjusted to the fact that something crucially has changed.

Lisa Jardine28:13

I think what I learned was how wonderful human beings were if you let them know you needed help.

Lisa Jardine28:20

you know, the number of random acts of kindness that I was subject to.

Presenter28:26

Let's have some more music, Lisa Jardine. You're on your seventh already. Tell me about this.

Lisa Jardine28:30

Yeah.

Lisa Jardine28:31

One of the things that my husband introduced me to alongside

Lisa Jardine28:37

Cerebral pop.

Lisa Jardine28:39

was opera, high opera. Now he too was introducing himself and it happened when I was ill. He, as a man, found that opera was where he could let his emotions go and weep over the ridiculous stories of opera and it was cathartic. While I was ill and he was at home a lot, we watched endless Blu-rays of wonderful, wonderful performances. I wanted to have an aria that captured everything that we had shared and continue to share in opera and I decided to take it from Mozart and this I could play over and over again. It's from Mozart's Marriage of Figura.

Presenter30:26

Dovi Sono from Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, sung there by Dorothea Rochmann, with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Nicolas Arnancourt. Let's talk then for your time at the HFEA, the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority. You were there for six years. It's a fixed term, as I understand it. It is, of course, not just the science, it is the emotion that makes these areas so damnably difficult to deal with. Emotions run high and they run high quickly. You said to me at the beginning today that you have always

Speaker 130:42

See

Speaker 130:43

Understand it.

Lisa Jardine30:44

Yeah.

Presenter30:58

Prided yourself in the public sphere in keeping emotion out of it. Were there times when you were dealing with these cases when you had to just take a moment because you realized you were.

Presenter31:07

You were proclaiming on the very stuff of life itself.

Lisa Jardine31:12

And of course I said to you that I was very, very cerebral, but had this deep emotional core. Without boasting, I'd say that that was the ideal set of qualifications for that job. I rarely had to speak to a patient, but if I did, I almost always went away and cried. I had to battle it out with my chief executive, who was better than me at seeing the boundaries between the law and what was possible.

Presenter31:43

So, Professor Lisa Jardine, you're seventy-one now. You're still working and you're still writing, and I'm imagining that.

Presenter31:51

You couldn't really ever see yourself retiring, could you?

Lisa Jardine31:54

No. No. I mean, academics don't have to retire. That's one of the things to say. I mean, I I don't mean statutorily. I mean, um, because your head keeps working and why not keep it working sort of in the classroom?

Presenter32:08

What do you see?

Lisa Jardine32:08

Think you've taught your own

Presenter32:09

and children that they they take with them.

Lisa Jardine32:13

Uh Not to be so driven.

Presenter32:13

Even

Presenter32:15

Oh.

Presenter32:16

Yeah.

Lisa Jardine32:16

But they are.

Lisa Jardine32:19

And why should they not be?

Lisa Jardine32:21

Because it's not entirely happy, you know.

Lisa Jardine32:24

It's full of competitions between things you'd like to do and things you feel you must do.

Lisa Jardine32:30

There's no down time there's no down time, ever.

Lisa Jardine32:34

Even the opera you're paying full attention.

Presenter32:37

Have there been times when you think, I wish I could just turn the switch?

Lisa Jardine32:41

Oh.

Presenter32:41

Uh

Lisa Jardine32:42

Well, I knit. I am a very, very prolific knitter, as all of my students know because I always knit them cardies for their new babies. I'm a prolific knitter because when my eldest son, Daniel, was seven and we had just separated, Nick and I, I was standing in the kitchen with Daniel and he said to me from behind my back, you never face me when you talk to me.

Lisa Jardine33:09

He's seven. I was completely horrified. I thought he always had my full attention. He didn't feel it like that. He felt there were all these other competing things. At that point it was the washing up.

Lisa Jardine33:19

And I remembered that my mother had taught me to knit, amongst all the other domestic things she'd taught me. And I began to knit, and I've knitted ever since, and it means that if I feel my hands are doing nothing, and I have one of my children there, they're quite happy that I knit.

Lisa Jardine33:37

And so when you knit, do you talk? Yeah. Right. I don't do complicated patterns most of the time.

Presenter33:43

I'm so glad I was I was about that was my next question. Is it then just another outpouring of your sort of I don't want to call it competitiveness, but sort of the need to be very good?

Lisa Jardine33:52

Well, I'd have that. I knitted my youngest son a cable jumper of great complexity, but that did involve doing it when nobody else was there.

Presenter33:59

Let's have your final piece of music. Tell me about this. Why have you chosen it?

Lisa Jardine34:02

It's a song sung by Juliet Greco, who was the great pin-up of the left, the existentialist movement. My mother adored her. And the one that I've chosen is written by Raymond Kinneau, who's not one of the sort of major existentialists, but my goodness, it tells you how it is.

Speaker 134:24

Timagine, si tut imagine, fiet fiette, situ timagine, savax savaxa, valure toujour la seison, des la seison, deson laza mour, su de bour, fiet de fiet, se que tut de gour si tu croix, petite, si tu croix, mm, que tent de rose, ta taille de gape, di mignion biset.

Presenter34:49

Hmm.

Presenter34:54

C'estout imagine sung there by Juliet Craicot. And you should uh tell uh listeners who don't speak French what what was the gist of the song?

Lisa Jardine35:01

Well the gist is actually the same as Marvell's to his coin mistress, which is, you're so beautiful, you've got it all, go for it now, because wrinkles, double chins, paisant de grace, heavy grease will overcome you and you've got I want you to grasp it all now.

Presenter35:20

It's time for the books then, Lisa. Um, you've got the complete works of Shakespeare to take, along with the Bible, and another book of your own. What are you going to take to the island?

Lisa Jardine35:28

Well, a slight cheat, of course, which is the complete 12 volumes of P. S. Allen's Latin Letters of Erasmus of Rotterdam. Because ever since I published my book on Erasmus, I've desperately wanted to write the great work on the letters and never had time. And this will be when I have time. Oh, can we give you 12 volumes? We'll get letters. We'll get letters. Yeah, I know. Well, there isn't a condensed edition, so. And they're all in Latin. Come on, listeners. It's Latin.

Presenter35:47

Yes, I know.

Presenter35:54

Uh

Lisa Jardine35:54

What will your luxury be? Well, I told you I knit, I also cook. Cooking is my love. I would like some cooking utensils as my luxury, because although I think I'll find things to cook, I need a large le Creuse pot, preferably in the original Love It Green, and, you know, maybe a few condiments. But I I would leave it at the Le Creuse.

Presenter36:17

Right, that's yours then. And if you could have only one of these eight discs, which one would you choose?

Lisa Jardine36:22

You know perfectly well it would be Annie Lennox's wife.

Presenter36:25

It's yours then, Professor Lisa Jardine. Thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you for having me.

Presenter37:12

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 4.