Henry Marsh

Speaker 10:00

This is the BBC.

Presenter0:03

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, the book and the luxury item that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island.

Presenter0:16

For rights' reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast. You can find over two thousand more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Disc's website.

Presenter0:49

My castaway to day is the neurosurgeon Henry Marsh, in his decades dedicated to saving people's brains from the ravages of disease and injury.

Presenter0:58

He has surely worked in the most select and intimate area of medicine, plying his craft and doing his best to balance detachment with compassion and hope with realism. What he describes as the fierce and happy concentration of his work came to wider attention through his compelling best selling memoir Do No Harm, where, along with his considerable accomplishments, the anxieties and tragedies of his high flying career were laid starkly bare.

Presenter1:27

He may well be the only eminent Eurosurgeon who has also spent time working as a hospital porter.

Presenter1:33

And it was that stint, as a young man, lifting and laying patients and swabbing down walls and equipment, that exposed him to what he describes as the controlled and altruistic violence of the operating theatre. From there on in, he was pretty much hooked. He says, A brain surgeon's life is never boring and can be profoundly rewarding, but it comes at a price. You will inevitably make mistakes, and you must learn to live with the occasionally awful consequences. You must learn to be objective about what you see, and yet not lose your humanity in the process. Welcome, Henry Marsh. To be a patient, then, we usually have to imbue surgeons with a sort of superhuman quality. Do you understand almost the necessity that we have in that?

Henry Marsh2:20

Yes, I think so. I don't know what sort of doctor I'd have been if my son hadn't had a brain tumour when he was only three months old. But I was at the receiving end right at the beginning of my surgical career when I was training as a general surgeon. And I think that gave me a lot of insight, which other doctors often don't get until they're much older, as to what it's like to be at the receiving end, which is, of course, one is frightened, one is terrified, and particularly if you're faced by major surgery.

Presenter2:49

A highly accomplished career, as many people will know, and you wrote, I've called it a memoir, Do No Harm, in 2014, followed by a second book a few years later. In that first book, as I described there briefly, you know, you talk about many of your operations, and most of them incredibly successful, but you also detail the ones that weren't. Well, yes, some of them. Why feel the need to do that? Why write it?

Henry Marsh3:08

Some of them

Henry Marsh3:13

We learn most from our mistakes. And a great problem in medicine is, particularly in a dangerous specialty like neurosurgery, the the consequences of our mistakes are so terrible for our patients it's very difficult to admit to them, let alone to oneself.

Henry Marsh3:28

So I suppose, although I don't think I was consciously aware of it at the time when I was writing the book, I was trying to set an example as a senior surgeon about being more open and more honest.

Presenter3:40

Our first piece of music, Henry Marsh. What are we going to hear?

Henry Marsh3:42

Well, B.B. King's Better Not Look Down. I mean, it's a great song with great lyrics that always make me laugh when I hear them. But it's the analogy. Being a neurosurgeon is rather like being on a tightrope. Yes, you need frightfully good sense of balance to walk on a tightrope. Yes, to be a neurosurgeon, you need to be good with your hands. But the really difficult bit is not looking down. It's the context. Yes, we could all walk on a narrow strip on the ground, but if there's a hundred-foot drop below it, it's a totally different experience. And what really makes neurosurgery difficult is not the technicalities of the operating, which actually, after a few years of training, is quite easy. It is the seriousness of things if they go wrong. It's the whole human context and the thought of the damaged patient, the miserable family after the operation that makes it difficult. But you have to keep your nerve despite those anxieties and yet at the same time remain human.

Speaker 14:36

I've been around and I've seen some things.

Speaker 14:40

People moving faster than the speed of sound.

Speaker 14:44

Faster than the speeding bullet. People living like Superman.

Speaker 14:48

All day and all night.

Speaker 14:50

And I won't say if it's wrong, or I won't say if it's right. I'm pretty fast myself.

Speaker 14:57

But I do have some advice to pass along right here in the woods of this song.

Speaker 15:04

Yeah.

Speaker 15:06

Gift your bond.

Presenter5:09

That was B B King, and better not look down. Henry, the saying goes that a surgeon has to have nerves of steel, the heart of a lion, and the hands of a woman. It's a neat phrase. What what do you make of it?

Henry Marsh5:19

Well, that's the sort of traditional view of the surgeon. In fact, I think it goes back to the seventeenth century, but is often attributed to a famous general surgeon called Lord Moynihan at the beginning of the last century. I disagree with it. Because

Henry Marsh5:36

That that's the easy bit. What's special about surgery is is you're actually invading other people's bodies in a dangerous way. And it's the psychological difficulty of that and all the consequences.

Presenter5:49

You write incredibly revealingly about that. I want to quote directly from your book here. You've written, as I climb into the operating chair, behind this is the patient's head, I feel like a medieval knight mounting his horse and setting off in pursuit of a mythical beast. And the view down the microscope is indeed a little magical.

Presenter6:12

Can you describe it to me, the view down the microscope?

Henry Marsh6:14

Most of us will have looked through a very good pair of binoculars, where the world looks somehow more real when magnified than with normal vision. And that that description is the upside. It's the addictive element of operating. It's the combination of excitement and anxiety. I mean, we know it's very hard to say where excitement becomes fear. And what makes surgery exciting is well, it's exciting. You become a surgeon because it's exciting. But what makes it exciting is your anxiety the patient should do well.

Henry Marsh6:49

There's a common dismissive idea that surgeons are psychopaths. Technically that's not true, because if you were a psychopath, you wouldn't care very much about what happened to the patient. Now it might well be, and again the common stereotype of the surgeon is a arrogant, cold, brusque, dismissive. But this, in my opinion, doesn't reflect a psychopathic personality. It reflects rather mechanisms of ego defence, as the psychiatrists call it. Because the nicer you are to patients, the more it hurts you when things go badly.

Presenter7:05

Yeah.

Henry Marsh7:23

So there's a strong element of self-preservation in treating patients in a slightly cold and detached way to enable you to do the work. If you're very nice and friendly and charming with patients, and then if you do dangerous surgeries such as brain surgery, you're going to feel all the worse afterwards. And yet again, it's all this complex balance because when I see a patient, you don't just want to give them the technical information, you want to help them as well. You want to support them. And most of us as patients, we want guidance and we don't the idea that we're given the facts and then we decide is not true. If you have a rare, complicated medical problem, you want your doctor to actually tell you this is what needs to be done. Some more music, Henry Marsh. What's next? My musical god is Beethoven, although I have very broad musical tastes. I went through a very unhappy I've had various episodes being I'm a very emotional person. I'm probably totally unsuited to being a surgeon psychologically. I don't know. And I had a period when I was very depressed and anxious and unhappy when I was factor at Oxford University and I spent a short time in a psychiatric hospital and had psychotherapy for quite a long time afterwards, which I found enormously helpful. I think everybody is better off for a bit of psychotherapy. When I came out of the hospital,

Henry Marsh8:38

I played in a rather self-consciously emotional way this part of that one of the late Beethoven string quartets, which I think Beethoven wrote on the score, owed to Thanksgiving, on recovery from a long illness. And it's a slow movement of the Opus 132, which is a very, very slow fugue. Conjures up with an enormous sense of recovery of life starting again.

Presenter10:04

That was part of the third movement from Beethoven's String Quartet No. fifteen in A minor, opus one thirty two, played by the Hungarian string quartet there. Henry Marsh, you've written that as you've gotten older you have come to understand just how completely I am my parents' creation.

Presenter10:22

Tell me more about that.

Henry Marsh10:24

My mother was German. She was a political refugee from Nazi Germany. In effect, my father had gone to Germany to learn German in 1936. He was a great internationalist. He was secretary of the Oxford University League of Nations Society. So he was always a very, very moral and politically moral person. And he went to Germany to learn German. He went to Hulle, where Handel came from. And he was in Digs there. And my mother was in lodgings there because she'd refused to join the Deutsches Medel, the women's equivalent of the Hitler Youth, and said she couldn't go to university. She was sort of a conscientious objector. And my father, in effect, I think, was more or less the first person whom she could openly talk to about her unhappiness, about what was going on in Germany. And Germain got into trouble with Gestapo for having she was reported for having expressing anti-Hitler views in the bookshop where she was training as a bookseller.

Henry Marsh11:22

And it more or less in effects my father married her to get her out of Germany so she could get out of trouble. It was a very successful marriage. Oh, yes. But there certainly it was a marriage partly based

Presenter11:30

Period.

Henry Marsh11:34

on liberal political principles and freedom and democracy and everything else. But in Mendez, I was exposed to an awful lot of books from a very early age. And my mother was immensely musical. And I remember when I was about seven or eight, my mother gave me some of those EP extended play little discs. And one was the Red Army Choir.

Speaker 111:52

Uh

Presenter11:52

Yeah.

Speaker 111:52

Uh

Henry Marsh11:57

And I I like that very much. And as we can discuss, I I I've had a long relationship rather eccentrically, n not so much with Russia as with Ukraine. And in some ways maybe it goes back to hearing Kalinka sung

Presenter12:11

When I was eight years old. Let's have your next piece of music, Henry Marsh. We're on your third. You mentioned it briefly.

Henry Marsh12:17

Well, this is the Red Army choir singing in Kalinka. When I was at Oxford reading, I initially did politics, philosophy and economics. I did a special paper in Soviet studies. And I was always just fascinated by Russian society, some for bad reasons. Well, it's bad, but it was sort of partly gained my mother, Nazis. I was always and still am very interested by totalitarian politics and problems, which I suppose is gained from my mother. The problem of the individual, what do you do your individual conscience when you're living in a deeply unsympathetic society? And I never thought I'd end up combining Kremlinology, which I probably would have ended up being, with brain surgery, but for various reasons I did by working off and on in Ukraine for the last 28 years.

Speaker 112:56

B

Presenter13:31

Uh

Henry Marsh13:32

God's more you, but

Presenter13:35

Yeah.

Henry Marsh13:47

Uh

Speaker 113:49

Uh

Henry Marsh13:49

Yeah.

Presenter13:51

Uh

Presenter13:54

Hermos Kalinka, composed by Ivan Larianov, and performed there by the Red Star, Red Army Chorus, with Yevgeny Balyaev, directed by Antony Bajalkin. You mentioned as you introduced that piece of music, Henry Marsh, that you had worked on and off in Ukraine for the last sort of 28 years. 26 years. 26 years. I wonder, this impulse to volunteer, to save, it is probably among the most admirable of human qualities. When do you think it began to originate in you? How young were you?

Henry Marsh14:13

Six years ago.

Henry Marsh14:25

I hate the word charity. I don't even like the word volunteering.

Henry Marsh14:28

Yes, it's true. I mean, a lot of the work I've done abroad is actually very difficult and incredibly stressful. And I'm always very relieved to get back home. But I do because it's so interesting. I mean, it it yes, it's good to help. And one of the reasons I became a doctor is I have what I regard as an almost pathological need to feel useful, which is why I'm finding being semi-retired quite difficult at times. But all I know is it's a great privilege to be a doctor, because just by virtue of doing your work, you are helping people. It's also rather corrupting, of course. It's a bit of a moral luxury. It's why doctors can easily become very pleased with themselves. You just do your job and you have people

Presenter15:09

Frightfully grateful to you. This usefulness, is that where the carpentry comes in? You like to be able to do that. It's making things, yeah.

Henry Marsh15:13

That's making things. Yeah, it's making things. And that's useful, I suppose.

Presenter15:15

Well that's useful isn't it?

Henry Marsh15:19

I didn't like the wor those pompous words, but I mean it's it's this or deep creative urge, I suppose you could call it. I I get I have to be making things all the time, whether they're trying to help patients or making things in my workshop or whatever. It's I I c I find it very hard to sit still.

Presenter15:34

Let's have some more music, Henry Marsh. What are we going to hear? This is your fourth of the day.

Henry Marsh15:39

This is Rai Kuda. I work in many countries medically as well as England. And money and medicine are never, never far apart. And it's one of the problems in medicine is that patients, as patients, we're so vulnerable, we're so desperate. And as in many countries, where patients are being ripped off, some doctors are easily corrupted. And money, you know, the great strength of the NHS, and the NHS are not unique, and the Scandinavian medical systems are fantastic and similarly funded, is that as a doctor, you have no pecuniary interest in what you're doing to the patient. You may have limited resources. And I just like the words of his song, which sum that up very nicely.

Speaker 116:21

Uh

Henry Marsh16:21

Uh

Speaker 116:21

Well the Doctor comes around with his face all bright

Speaker 116:29

And he says in a little while you'll be alright.

Speaker 116:37

All he gives is a humbug pill Dose of dope and a great big bill Tell me, how can a poor man stay in such times and live?

Presenter16:51

Reichuder, how can a poor man stand such times and live? You secured this open scholarship then to Oxford to study PPE in the autumn of nineteen seventy one.

Henry Marsh16:58

They are

Speaker 116:58

Uh

Henry Marsh16:59

Yeah.

Presenter17:02

You were around about twenty-one and you

Henry Marsh17:04

And you decided to quit your degree course? Well, I I fell unhappily in love with a a much older woman. It was all very embarrassing. And it provoked what used to be called a sort of nervous breakdown. But my way of dealing with it was to run away. So how unhappy did you get? Oh, very unhappy. I I've pretty suicidal.

Henry Marsh17:22

And I couldn't carry on. But again, it's bizarre,'cause I the girlfriend of a friend of mine, her father, was a general surgeon in a mining town north of Newcastle called Ashington. And I had this idea, I wanted to go and work in a hospital. I think the idea

Henry Marsh17:39

Was sort of somehow, it's ridiculous. I'm so unhappy. I ought to go and see people who are really properly ill, you know. So it's sort of morbid in a way.

Henry Marsh17:49

But to a sort of physician heals thyself almost.

Presenter17:52

And this was your time spent as a hospital porter.

Henry Marsh17:54

And that was my time spent as well. So so it wouldn't happen now in the NHS. This this surgeon s without knowing me, purely on the say-so of his daughter, told the hospital management there's this young man who wants to work as a porter.

Henry Marsh18:07

I got a job!

Henry Marsh18:09

And I spent six months working as a theatre writing very, very bad second-rate poetry, which I'm glad I've destroyed. And during that time I realized that I did want a professional middle-class career after all. I didn't want to kill myself, but I wanted a professional middle-class career of my own choosing. And having watched surgeons at work, although it was all general surgery and orthopedic surgery, I thought that's what I want to do.

Henry Marsh18:33

But I was able to get into the Roll Free Hospital, to which again I owe an enormous debt of gratitude, which was the only medical school in England, I think, which took people without science A level. You did an extra year called First MB. And it was the last year they ran the First MB course. And they had this collection of odds and sods like me who were desperate to become doctors. We must fit in the music, Henry. Tell us about your fifth. Joan Alma Trading, great musician. I love most of her songs. I was listening to her a lot when I was a medical student and when I was working for my medical finals. It was a happy time, fairly carefree. I was happily married to my first wife. We lived in a very small flat at the top of my parents' house in London.

Speaker 119:09

But it was a

Henry Marsh19:18

And um it's great music.

Presenter19:21

All the feeling.

Presenter19:24

When you'll breathe in.

Presenter19:27

You start madly thinking you're number one

Presenter19:31

Down to zero if they were leaving

Presenter19:36

For another one

Presenter19:40

Now you want me to be my bummer.

Presenter19:45

Down to the ground, down to the ground.

Presenter19:51

Down to the ground, down to the ground.

Presenter19:54

That was doing armor trading and down to zero. And you said, Henry Marsh, one of the reasons you'd chosen that was because for you it brought back memories of simple and happy times, those early married years. They were to become a lot more complex when your first born, your son William, fell very ill. He he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. What what are your memories at that time?

Henry Marsh20:14

I was working as a houseman, so I was working very long hours. It was one in twos. I was on call every other night and every other weekend. And my wife said, isn't Williams Fontenelle? Isn't should it be like that? And I said, oh, it's all right. And then I was working late. And then she rang me to say that William wasn't quite right and she'd gone to the clinic and they said his head was too big. And he was now admitted to the local hospital. And then he was taken to Great Orme Street the next day and had a brain scan. And he was diagnosed with a very serious brain tumour called a coriplexus papilloma in a very unusual place in the middle of the brain.

Henry Marsh20:52

And it was he was very ill and and they'd sedated him for the scan. He just didn't wake up.

Henry Marsh20:58

And I thought something was wrong. I was panicking and I didn't know anything about pediatric neurosurgery, although I eventually became one myself. And it was a complete nightmare, because I told the doctors, look, you know, isn't something wrong? He said, no, everything's all right. And they said, well, when is the consultant coming? And they said, well, we don't know. He's not here at the moment. And I remember going on this sort of crazy sort of nightmarish running around the hospital trying to find this mythical consultant to say, well, no, help, help.

Henry Marsh21:26

And then I s I went into a fugue state. I couldn't I s went went out. I couldn't I ran away. I couldn't stand it anymore.

Henry Marsh21:32

And then in fact the consultant had turned up and had taken one look at William and had immediately carried out an emergency bedside operation on the spot. And then we had to wait um several days before a definitive operation, which was terrible. Um so it was awful time.

Henry Marsh21:50

I don't know what sort of doctor I would have been like if I hadn't had that experience. But I knew from very painful personal experience what it was like to be a desperately anxious parent think watching your child. Thinking your child is about

Presenter22:04

To die. And Williams, just to be clear to listeners, Williams' operation was successful. It was successful. Let's have some more music, Henry. It's your sixth.

Henry Marsh22:08

It was hateful.

Henry Marsh22:12

It's a

Henry Marsh22:14

When my marriage was ending I was I was unhappily in love with somebody else. It was all embarrassing and painful and miserable in in retrospect. But I remember once listening to the slow movement of a Schubert quintette, which is a bit of music I know very well.

Henry Marsh22:27

And first of all, it is an exquisite bit of music in its own terms. Secondly, it brings back to me how being madly in love is wonderful, but it's a sort of madness at the same time.

Speaker 122:30

Exquisite

Henry Marsh22:41

And I mean I look back at it and go, How could I be so stupid? you know? And yet it's so wonderful, and everything feels unified and whole and beautiful, and one becomes madly optimistic. It is an extraordinary process. It fades with time. But for Schubert Quintet doesn't fade with time.

Presenter23:49

That was part of the second movement from Schubert's string quintet in C major, played by the Amadeus quartet, joined there by Robert Cohen on cello. You said that your father in his mid-nineties died, in your words, ten years too late, which is an admirably frank thing to say. How responsible do you think our modern

Speaker 124:03

Yeah.

Presenter24:09

Medics for encouraging us to consider the length of life above quality of life.

Presenter24:15

Yeah.

Henry Marsh24:15

Yeah.

Presenter24:15

Yeah.

Henry Marsh24:15

And I'm a great proponent of what I I prefer the phrase assisted dying. It's a big issue in many European countries at the moment.

Presenter24:22

It is a very big issue, and I'm afraid we don't have. I'm really am afraid we don't have the time, so I'd love to talk to you about it in some detail. But can you sum up? I mean, of course.

Henry Marsh24:26

Talk to you about it in some detail.

Presenter24:29

Highly intensive is

Henry Marsh24:30

The answer is very difficult.

Henry Marsh24:33

There are lots of aspects we don't have time to discuss, as you say. But it's so much easier to treat than not to treat. It's something I discuss in in one of the books where if you have a patient with a large cerebral hemorrhage, if you operate, they'll probably live but be left very disabled. If you don't operate, they'll probably die. And it's much easier to tell the family, well, we'll operate. If we don't operate, we're going to die. And the family says, Well, you better operate. If you sit down with the family and say, Well, actually.

Henry Marsh25:02

You know, if if they do live, they're probably going to be very disabled. And then you've tried to discuss with the family what that means. That is a long conversation that takes at least an hour. It's a frightening conversation because as the surgeon, you're always, well, maybe I'm wrong. You know, maybe they'll survive. Maybe they'll be better than I expect. So it's this built-in ratchet to over-treat.

Henry Marsh25:24

and generate a large number of very disabled people for the sake of maybe a small number who will make a good recovery. There are no easy answers. We are reluctant to die. We will cling on.

Presenter25:36

Yeah.

Henry Marsh25:37

To the last man?

Presenter25:38

And there's no getting away from that. A good time to take a break for some music, I think. Tell me about what we're going to hear. This is your setting.

Henry Marsh25:43

Well, this is Fu Song, the the Chinese pianist.

Henry Marsh25:47

Whom I've had the honour of meeting once, playing Scarlatti on the piano. They're not Scarlatti, as Scarlatti probably meant it to be heard. And that's because when I moved house, when I became a consultant in the old Atkinson Morleys hospital in Wimbledon, when my wife and the family moved from Ballham to Wimbledon, and our neighbour was this rather odd-looking chap wearing a sort of sheepskin driving coat and drove an MGA sports car parked in front of his house. And I thought, who's that scruffy person?

Henry Marsh26:18

And he turned out to be a an Anglo-Polish man who almost instantly became my best friend, and we've been best friends ever since now for almost 30 years. Roman is a man of an extraordinary large number of parts, but one is he worked as a sound recordist, and this in fact is a recording of Scarlatti played by Food Song, which Roman himself recorded.

Presenter27:30

Scarletti's sonata in C major K 95, played there by Foodsang. Your writing is unsparing in acknowledging the limitations of medicine and the fallibility at times of its practitioners. When you are speaking, as you do often these days, to young doctors embarking on a life in neurosurgical work, what do you say to them? What's your advice? Ask for help.

Presenter27:52

Right.

Henry Marsh27:52

is the answer.

Henry Marsh27:54

If I look back in my earlier career, I mean, it's partly me being ambitious driven single combat self glorification, normal testosterone, alpha nail stuff, but also partly the um

Henry Marsh28:08

surgical culture at the time, which in the NHS were see one do one, and you were thought a bit of a sissy if you said, Well, sir, I don't quite know what to do. I did some terrible things and patients suffered because I basically got stuck, but rather than daring to ask my boss to come and bail me out, I carried on.

Henry Marsh28:26

And that is peculiar, I think, not just to me, but the way medicine was like forty years ago. I think that is a lot better now. One one does try, I try within my department, right now I play a minor role as the old old fart who wanders in occasionally from time to time, to create an atmosphere where there's no shame in saying I don't know what to do. There's no shame in saying

Presenter28:48

Saying I need help.

Henry Marsh28:48

Yeah.

Presenter28:48

Is there an element of it that is I mean, when you described, as you did so brilliantly, this idea that it was analogous with walking a tightrope and the best thing was to not look down, walking a tightrope is, of course, pretty much a young person's game. Is there an element of that in

Speaker 128:55

Uh

Henry Marsh28:55

The best

Speaker 128:55

Yeah.

Henry Marsh29:01

Is that

Henry Marsh29:03

Well, that is a very interesting question. It's the old problem we face with dangerous surgery.

Presenter29:05

Yeah.

Henry Marsh29:09

If you say don't operate, are you being wise or are you being a coward? And if you do operate, are you being brave or are you being reckless? And that balance changes, and it changes partly with experience. You probably become wiser. But as you get older, your testosterone levels drop. Maybe you're losing that cutting edge, and you'll stop taking risks maybe you should take.

Henry Marsh29:33

The solution to the problem is to work together, you know, with different surgeons at different ages.

Presenter29:39

A slightly more collective approach. You are a very practical man, clearly. You'll do pretty well on the island. What would be your plan? Uh.

Henry Marsh29:46

Uh that depends what I'm allowed to take with me.

Presenter29:49

Oh well we'll come to Well in that case, let's just go into the eighth bit of moves right now. What are we going to hear?

Henry Marsh29:49

Yeah.

Henry Marsh29:52

Yeah.

Henry Marsh29:53

Well, we're getting here Bach, the Barmer Dieck. I said my mother was German. She was very proud of the fact she'd actually heard the St Matthew performed in the Thomas Kirche in Leipzig, where it was originally performed. She heard it there in 1937. But why I partic I mean it's again a beautiful bit of music, but I like it particularly because I don't have any religious faith, never did. My parents were both very sincere but very relaxed Christians. It was a very important part of their life.

Henry Marsh30:24

But it seems to me

Henry Marsh30:26

When I think about Taino Bama Dixel, forgive us, O Lord

Henry Marsh30:29

You can reach very similar ethical conclusions to Christian ones without having to have God, simply applying the

Henry Marsh30:38

The golden route of Dersey would be done by.

Henry Marsh30:41

And all of us as surgeons can think of many occasions when we didn't do that. Sometimes you have to. I mean, all patients would like to be operated upon by the senior doctor, and you can't do all that, so we all will have delegated operations, and sometimes those operations have gone badly because I had overestimated my trainee's abilities. Kahneman calls it the halo effect in one of the cognitive biases. So we all have sort of skeletons in our cupboards and guilty secrets. The wish for forgiveness, the need for forgiveness, I think is very deeply rooted in people. And you don't have to invoke a sort of fierce Christian God as a source for that. And I've always liked the words of the Athanasian Creed. I remember having to recite once, twice a week in Westminster Abbey when I was at school, of, you know, we've done those things we ought not to have done and not done those things we should have done, etc. And for me, that music sums it up.

Presenter31:54

Holy Lord

Presenter32:17

Oh let him please

Presenter32:37

Er Barmadij from Bach St. Matthew Passion. That was Andrea Scholl, accompanied by the Collegium Vocale, directed by Philip Herveke. It's time then, Henry, for me to give you some books. Everyone gets the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. You get to take one other book along if you're choosing. What's it gonna be? Teach yourself a Ukrainian. Ah.

Presenter32:57

Yeah.

Henry Marsh32:57

I have many regrets. One of my biggest regrets in life is I don't really have a second language. I've got schoolboy French, which I'm so embarrassed to speak in France I can't. I'm the only member of my family who doesn't speak reasonably good German. And I'm a great internationalist and European, and I'm deeply ashamed of the fact I only really speak English. And because I spend so much time in Ukraine, and my colleagues all speak reasonable English, but I'd love to be able to communicate directly with my many Ukrainian friends. That's yours then.

Presenter33:25

Yeah.

Presenter33:28

That's that.

Presenter33:29

You may know you're allowed a luxury. I'm wondering what yours is going to be.

Henry Marsh33:32

Well, I was rather hoping an enormously large tool chest will have been swept up in a shipwreck, which I assume has deposited me on the desert island. Well, you see, you didn't.

Presenter33:40

Well you see you give me

Presenter33:43

As long as you promise that you won't make a boat to escape.

Henry Marsh33:47

Oh, yes, that's true. Yes. Well, I suppose, yes, well, that's rather difficult, then, isn't it? It is.

Presenter33:53

Given That you use

Henry Marsh33:54

Uh

Presenter33:54

Tis. Dust Free

Henry Marsh33:55

Maybe the desert island is so remote there's no realistic prospect of a raft getting anywhere with his adult

Presenter33:57

Yeah.

Presenter34:01

I'll get into trouble, you know, but all right. I'll give you do you have a garden shed where you have a little bit of workshop? I have a huge shed. Right, so you can have that shed. A shed. All right. Okay. Okay. And whatever is in. It does. It's yours. Which of the eight tracks would you save?

Henry Marsh34:05

Right.

Henry Marsh34:07

Uh

Henry Marsh34:09

Okay, and whatever is in the middle.

Henry Marsh34:11

It does.

Henry Marsh34:17

Thank the B B King. It makes me smile every time I hear it.

Presenter34:20

It's yours, Henry Marsh. Thank you very much for letting us.

Henry Marsh34:22

For letting us hear your desert island discs.

Presenter34:34

I hope you enjoyed this edition of Desert Island Discs. You'll find over 2,000 interviews with artists, musicians, scientists, sports stars, comedians, and more at bbc.co.uk/slash desertisland discs. And I have a favour to ask: if you could rate and review the Desert Island Discs podcast wherever you download your podcasts, it'll really help other people find us. Thanks again for listening.

Henry Marsh35:11

This is the BBC.

Speaker 235:16

This is a story about a man called Otto von Wechter. He was Austrian, a lawyer, a husband, a father, and a very senior Nazi. It's a story of life and love, and of a curious death.

Speaker 235:30

You could say it's a sort of mystery story.

Speaker 235:33

Otto Vechter is a Nazi you've never heard of.

Speaker 235:37

Because he escaped justice.

Speaker 235:39

I'm Philippe Sands and I'm going to take you on an unexpected journey.

Speaker 235:45

To find out what actually happened.

Speaker 235:47

to Otto Fechter.

Speaker 235:49

It's a journey that goes right to the heart of something called the Rat Line, the Nazi escape route out of Europe that started in 1945.

Speaker 236:00

Along the way we're going to meet an unlikely cast of Nazis, fascists, assassins, spies, sons of spies, lovers, murderers.

Speaker 236:09

and an elderly man who lives alone in a castle steeped in family secrets, who I've come to know rather well.

Speaker 236:17

To subscribe, just search for Intrigue, the rat line, wherever you get your podcasts.