Robert Burchfield

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

Speaker 10:05

For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty five, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Speaker 30:29

Our castaway this week is a lexicographer. He's chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, Dr. Robert Birchfield.

Speaker 30:38

Doctor Birchfield, the dictionary is produced actually in Oxford, is it?

Robert Burchfield0:41

Yes, it's produced in thirty seven A St. Giles, right in central Oxford, a gorgeous Georgian mansion, just by the war memorial.

Speaker 30:50

The Oxford University Press is in fact.

Robert Burchfield0:53

Part of the university? Technically it's part of the university, but it's not part of the financial structure, as much as I understand it, of the university.

Speaker 31:00

It produces some excellent books on music.

Robert Burchfield1:03

Take Is music an interest of yours? Not particularly. I grew up in a fairly silent home. I used to r run a lot, play a lot of games, go fishing and various things of that kind. But my parents were not musical, and the house was fairly silent in this regard.

Speaker 31:20

Well, we've given you this task of assembling eight disks to last you for a long time, so it was fairly difficult.

Robert Burchfield1:26

Not difficult now, but would have been difficult when I was five, six, seven, or eight.

Robert Burchfield1:32

What's the first one? The first one might sound rather surprising, Choice. The Skyboat Song. When I was at school in a town called Wanganui in New Zealand, like so many schools, we had school assemblies with the music teacher requiring us all to sing. There were many songs that we were all persuaded to sing, but the Skyboat Song is one particularly that I remember.

Speaker 31:56

Have you any?

Robert Burchfield1:56

Scots ancestry? Yes, my grandfather was a Scots. He emigrated from Scotland about the turn of the century.

Speaker 42:24

It's sound on the wind floor.

Speaker 33:06

The Skybird Song by the Scottish National Orchestra and Chorus.

Speaker 33:12

Whereabouts in New Zealand? Duke.

Robert Burchfield3:13

Come.

Speaker 33:13

Uh

Robert Burchfield3:13

I was born in in a small coastal town called Whanganui. An agricultural town, isn't it? It's a port. What did you want to be?

Speaker 33:17

The code

Robert Burchfield3:21

I wasn't sure. It was quite clear to me that my mother and father, who were pretty desperately poor, hadn't achieved very much by doing what they had done. They kept telling me that I must get myself educated. It wasn't clear to me whether they meant a trade or to become a schoolmaster or what. But get yourself educated and you'll be beyond the poverty barrier. And that, I suppose, if I rationalise it now, was roughly speaking what I was trying to do. In fact, your education was interrupted by induction.

Speaker 33:53

Yeah.

Robert Burchfield3:54

Into the army? Yes. Life has its fortunes and misfortunes. Uh I was up at university in nineteen forty. I wasn't old enough to be drafted into the army, but in nineteen forty one they took me into the army as a conscript. We were all put in for three months as conscripts.

Robert Burchfield4:14

In my third month, the Japanese came into the war at the time of Pearl Harbor, and the three months turned into six years of army service. Where did you serve? I served first of all in a province of New Zealand called the Wairapa and went round helping to prepare maps, ordnance survey maps from aerial photographs. Learned all about trigonometry and plane tables and, generally speaking, map making. Then I went off to the real war in Italy.

Robert Burchfield4:45

and there was involved in fixing the position of our guns and fixing the position of German guns so that we could fire our guns precisely on to them at any time that we chose to.

Speaker 35:00

I believe one of your exploits was to liberate Venice.

Robert Burchfield5:03

Yes, uh that's how I playfully put it to uh grandchildren and others, that the New Zealand army walked into this uncontested, not defended, city one afternoon towards the end of the war, and we bagged it. Were the Venetians glad to see you? The Venetians seemed to be glad to see us. Most of us got into gondolas and did the usual things. And my particular group, a small survey troupe, three or four of us were together, and we were invited into a gorgeous house somewhere along the canal route by a very grand Italian lady who preached us a great old fascist doctrine about how New Zealand was empty, Italy was full.

Speaker 15:40

Blend

Robert Burchfield5:42

And surely we could see that Italy needed to expand, and that they should all, it seemed to me, go to New Zealand.

Speaker 45:50

Uh

Robert Burchfield5:51

But nothing happened.

Speaker 35:51

Is that rather ambitious?

Robert Burchfield5:53

Nothing happened to that scheme. We had a very nice afternoon. She served us tea and cakes, and it was all very nice indeed. What's your second record? My second record is a Maori song. New Zealand, as you doubtless know, has got two major groups of people, the Pakehas, the white people, and the Maoris. And I've chosen one called Pokari Kari Ana, which is a love song, a waiata of the Maori people. It is a modern song, not a traditional one. Nevertheless, it gives the impression of Maori Dom.

Speaker 46:35

Ah, why are you here?

Speaker 46:38

Come on.

Speaker 46:43

Pity on to quiet

Speaker 46:51

Mare no anai.

Speaker 36:59

Bucari Cariana by the Saint Joseph Maori Girls' College.

Speaker 37:05

So from Venice back to

Robert Burchfield7:08

Not immediately. We had to stay around in Italy for a while before troop ships could come along and take us back, and before the Japanese war ended we were to land in Japan and were being trained for that reason. So we stayed on a bit in Trieste. And one of the advantages of being a soldier not in action is that you have plenty of time. And so apart from drinking the lovely Marsala and playing billiards and so forth, we went to the opera in Trieste. And then we went down to Rome and had the unforgettable experience of going to the baths of Caracalla and hearing the opera again.

Robert Burchfield7:48

With names one had heard of. Benjamino Gigli, for instance. The only difficulty was that every time Gigli sang, the encores were so numerous that one had great difficulty getting away and going home. The Italians are so enthusiastic, and with typical New Zealander plum, one really was slightly embarrassed by all this. It was a gorgeous experience, and I shan't forget Benjamino Gigli.

Robert Burchfield8:18

And his Tosca.

Speaker 38:20

And you've chosen from Tosca, Gili singing, The Stars Were Brightly Shining. Yes.

Speaker 48:28

I'm not sure if I can do it.

Speaker 48:36

Oh, I will take

Speaker 49:00

I'm unfortunate.

Speaker 39:16

Benjamin Ozili, an Arya from Tosca. Or Dr. Birchfield, you didn't go to Japan.

Robert Burchfield9:22

No, fortunately we heard about the dropping of the atomic bomb and were of course relieved that the war was at an end.

Robert Burchfield9:31

Then we went back to New Zealand and went back to our families and resumed life. And what was one to do?

Robert Burchfield9:38

One had a BA degree. What do you do with a BA degree? Not very much. So I decided to go back to university, give up Zane Gray, who had become my favourite author in the army, and start to go back to the rigours of Germanic philology and of English literature. And of the other things that I was doing, but principally English.

Speaker 410:00

Yeah.

Robert Burchfield10:04

I finished my Master of Arts degree there. Then they made me a a lecturer at the university, and one gave instant lectures on Renaissance matters and various other matters. One thought one was so good, but they must have been very poor lectures. And then, quite astonishingly, I was made a Rhodes Scholar. This is a great distinction. How many are appointed each year? Two from New Zealand a year, from all subjects, as it were, so that one is in competition with lawyers and physicists and so forth. But two of us were dispatched to Oxford in 1949.

Robert Burchfield10:42

and a different world. The University of Wellington at that date was a university of one remove. I felt that Oxford was

Robert Burchfield10:52

noticeably, quite remarkably different, that things were happening immediately one walked into a face to face tutorial with CS Lewis. Not with his book, but with the man. And there he was listening to your trembling voice reading out an essay on

Robert Burchfield11:11

Whatever subject it might be, with Lewis it was mostly, in my case, Chaucer, sir.

Robert Burchfield11:17

And almost the first thing he said to me Birchfeld,

Robert Burchfield11:21

Do you know any Mozart? I said, Well, not not all that much. He said, Well, you'll never understand Chaucer.

Robert Burchfield11:28

If you don't listen to a lot of Mozart.

Robert Burchfield11:31

This wholly mysterious statement I've subsequently found to have a certain amount of foundation, but probably the phrase just floated into his head that evening at a tutorial.

Speaker 311:41

Have

Robert Burchfield11:42

and didn't mean a great deal to him.

Speaker 311:43

And then you became a lecturer in English?

Robert Burchfield11:46

Yes. Then I became a lecturer. I left Maudlin and became a lecturer at the House, as we call it, at Christ Church in Oxford, for five years a fixed term appointment which remorselessly came to its end in nineteen fifty seven, and I had the problem of unemployment looming up. What to do?

Robert Burchfield12:06

And at that moment

Robert Burchfield12:08

Everything became clear.

Robert Burchfield12:11

when the invitation came.

Robert Burchfield12:13

to prepare a supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Speaker 312:16

Dictionary.

Speaker 312:21

When was it started? When was it

Robert Burchfield12:23

Well, it was really started in eighteen fifty seven. The talking about it started then. It wasn't really begun until eighteen seventy nine by James Murray at Mill Hill School.

Robert Burchfield12:37

and the first little bit of it was published, A to Ant.

Robert Burchfield12:42

not very much territory. A to end was published in eighteen eighty four. Then it was published in instalments for the next forty four years.

Robert Burchfield12:52

The final instalment appeared in nineteen twenty eight.

Robert Burchfield12:56

and with in twelve volumes altogether. Twelve huge volumes. Twelve huge volumes, with every word treated historically and a great deal of scholarship b spread over every page.

Speaker 313:06

and rather than revise this great mammoth twelve volume work,

Speaker 313:12

They decided that there should be a supplement.

Robert Burchfield13:14

Yes, in the nineteen fifties the Oxford University Press realized that the whole fame and reputation of their dictionaries rested upon the Oxford English Dictionary, the big one. Other commercial houses, even the biggest American dictionary house, did not have that kind of dictionary as a foundation, and it needed desperately to be brought up to date.

Speaker 313:37

Yeah.

Robert Burchfield13:37

And so I was invited to prepare a one-volume, twelve hundred and fifty-page supplement to this great work, and to do it in six years. Before we hear about your problems, let's have another record. New Zealand is a fairly materialistic country, and it's filled with oases, or at least they're dotted all over the place. Wellington was one such, and we had visitors like Laurence Olivia and others. But in music, we had, for example, Isabel Bailey came out to sing for us, Moora Limpany came out, and Solomon came out and played the piano.

Robert Burchfield14:15

Isabel Bailey introduced me to one of the most glorious melodies of all time, De Forel the Trout.

Robert Burchfield14:23

and she hasn't herself recorded it, though she sang it to us in nineteen forty six or nineteen forty seven. And I've therefore decided to choose Elizabeth Schwartzkopf singing the trout.

Speaker 414:26

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 114:26

Tech

Speaker 414:42

Uh

Speaker 414:43

I am in all the shoes.

Speaker 414:50

I'm the biggest one.

Speaker 415:15

I fish on the roof, the bourgeois, with sauce with colour blue, visitors fish and bombs.

Speaker 315:40

Schubert's The Trout De Forella, sung by Elizabeth Schwartzkopf, an early recording made in 1946.

Speaker 315:49

So, twelve hundred and fifty pages of words left out of the main dictionary.

Robert Burchfield15:55

A problem. How did you set about it? Was very difficult. I went into the dictionary rooms on the first of July, nineteen fifty seven, and waited for the telephone to ring. I thought the publisher might actually tell me how to prepare the dictionary. I was soon, of course, disillusioned on that. Publishers also had the entirely charming idea.

Robert Burchfield16:16

That if I just wrote to the BBC, they would tell me all the terms of broadcasting. And if I wrote to The Economist, they would tell me all the terms to do with the commercial world. And the Met Office would tell me about weather forecasting vocabulary and so forth. If they have time. Of course, that was the missing element. One very quickly realized that the only way to go about it was to go right out, make lists, find people to read books and to read long runs of journals and newspapers and to make a note of every word and every sense that occurred that wasn't already covered by the dictionary.

Speaker 316:54

Now was there a budget to employ people to do that?

Robert Burchfield16:56

Not'specially. These were unbudgeted days. We're all in the nineteen eighties, very conscious of budgets and cutting and so forth. But in the nineteen fifties

Speaker 317:04

The

Robert Burchfield17:06

There was just a gentleman's agreement that one would be given what was necessary for the job.

Speaker 317:11

You were assembling all these snippets of information on on card index cards, I presume.

Robert Burchfield17:15

Yes, we were working mostly with the pen on six by four inch slips. Each card had one and one only item on it, a quotation letter say from Evelyn War, and with a particular meaning and the bottom of the card would say not recorded in dict in the dictionary. Something of that kind.

Speaker 317:34

Yeah.

Speaker 317:36

So you had different people reading the complete works of different authors.

Robert Burchfield17:41

Yes, for instance James Joyce was allotted to a schoolmaster in Feversham.

Robert Burchfield17:46

A mister Orty, he's now dead he read his way through the entire works of James Joyce, recording every item, however silly, however mysterious, that Joyce used that was not covered by the dictionary.

Speaker 318:00

And you had to assemble each entry with not just the meaning, but alternative spellings, data first, usage, derivation.

Speaker 318:08

Examples of how it was used and by whom, a vast amount of information.

Robert Burchfield18:13

That work was done in the House, that was done by the editorial group, The Reading of Sources, which is so time-consuming.

Robert Burchfield18:20

was done mostly by the general public for seven and sixpence an hour.

Robert Burchfield18:27

Yeah.

Speaker 318:27

How soon did it become apparent that one volume wasn't going to be enough?

Robert Burchfield18:31

quite early on and uh

Robert Burchfield18:33

Lexicographers are impatient beasts. I wanted at one stage to put the whole of the supplement out in fascicle form. Bear in mind that it was fifteen years from the time I started before even the first volume appeared. It's a long time to be patient when your scholarly work is not seen by anybody. I wanted it put out in fescicles, but quite rightly the OUP turned that down.

Robert Burchfield19:00

From the time Volume one came out, it was quite clear it was going to be a three volume dictionary. It didn't become clear that it was to be a four volume dictionary until we were well into the second one.

Speaker 319:11

It will be a wonderful moment when you see those four volumes together.

Robert Burchfield19:15

I should

Speaker 319:15

I should

Robert Burchfield19:15

Look forward to it, yes.

Speaker 319:17

Another record

Robert Burchfield19:18

Yeah.

Speaker 319:18

Yeah.

Robert Burchfield19:18

We spoke about Moretton. Moreland College is the college I came to in Oxford, and CS Lewis spoke to me about Mozart.

Robert Burchfield19:29

And of course one has an empire of music in Mozart. One doesn't know where to turn.

Robert Burchfield19:36

But to me a small but characteristic piece of his whole work is Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

Robert Burchfield19:45

And that's what I've chosen.

Speaker 320:49

The opening of Mozart's A Little Night Music, eine Kleine Nachmusik, played by the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields,

Speaker 320:57

conducted by Neville Marina.

Speaker 320:59

So, this vast work coming to its end.

Speaker 321:03

You've got all these curious manufactured words by writers like Joyce Beckett, Lewis Carroll, of course.

Robert Burchfield21:13

What about obscenities? Yes, they go into the dictionary just in the ordinary way. We take a deep breath and define the obscene words just as we would define a word in anatomy or in physiology. Hang up.

Speaker 321:27

Cool.

Robert Burchfield21:27

Slang goes in in great abundance. Slang is the language of the future. Must be recorded. However ephemeral. However ephemeral the general public regard it as really dustbin language that we really shouldn't bother with. But we know from hard experience that so much slang makes its way into general language as time goes on and cannot be distinguished in kind.

Speaker 321:33

However

Robert Burchfield21:50

from what you might call the accepted words. And of course you have to cover American slang, Australian slang? We must cover English wherever it's spoken, whether it's the West Indies or in India or in any of the other countries where English is widely spoken, naturally Canada, Australia, New Zealand and so on.

Robert Burchfield22:08

Rough.

Speaker 322:09

Fley, how many volunteer workers have you got all over the world digging the stuff out?

Robert Burchfield22:13

It tends to vary at the peak period we had at least a hundred people round the globe.

Robert Burchfield22:20

Nowadays it tends to be about twenty people collecting evidence for us, and something like fifty people reacting to galley proof entries for words. We send our galley proof entries for Russian words to Leningrad. for Chinese words to Beijing, for Malay words to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and so on, so that every word that uh is presented in its finally printed form has been looked at carefully by someone utterly familiar with the word, so nothing is left to chance.

Speaker 322:56

And then some day, I suppose, somebody is going to elide the supplement, the four volumes of the supplement, into the twelve volumes of the main work.

Speaker 323:05

bringing it to sixteen volumes.

Robert Burchfield23:07

Uh

Speaker 323:07

Then somebody else

Robert Burchfield23:07

Start on a new supplement to that? Yes, that has already started. There will not be a new supplement to that because of the electronic revolution. The twelve volumes of the dictionary are right now being keyboarded into an electronic database. They will be followed by the four volumes of the supplement, and then by all the pressing of buttons and the magic of modern computer technology, the four volumes will be merged with the twelve, making sixteen, of course, in extent. But you won't need to look up the dictionary twice from that point onward, only once.

Speaker 323:42

And

Robert Burchfield23:42

And also the electronic database has no limits of size at all.

Robert Burchfield23:48

Anything can be fed into it, and if you like, anything can be deleted.

Robert Burchfield23:53

Anything can be changed, modified, definitions can be rewritten.

Robert Burchfield23:58

Words that are long out of date the definitions of all, for instance, the terms in chemistry and physics, nearly all of them are totally out of date, they can all be rewritten within the computer. Of course the scholarship will be needed, but the computer has the capacity, whereas the printed word in a book

Speaker 124:05

Nearly.

Robert Burchfield24:18

The words are imprisoned within hard covers, and you must proceed with supplements to printed books. But with the electronic database, it's another kettle of fish altogether. And this marvellous world we live in has produced the right technology at the right moment. And a great vista lying before us. Yes, this particular project might be finished long within our lifetimes, but the extension of it stretches into the twenty-first century and into the infinity beyond that.

Speaker 324:52

In the meantime, let's have another record.

Robert Burchfield24:55

But I must speak with affection of the Oxford College that I first went to.

Robert Burchfield24:59

On the first of May each year.

Robert Burchfield25:02

A hymn, a Latin hymn, is sung from the Tar, and you know I was at Maudlin for four years or so, and I've been to the ceremony many, many times, especially when my children were young, but I've never actually heard this hymn.

Speaker 125:14

Mm-hmm.

Robert Burchfield25:20

played through because of the noise and the din and the birds singing and all that. It happened very early in the morning. It happens at dawn, yes. And it is a hymn T dium Petrum Columus.

Speaker 425:40

The Lord de Moos proceeds.

Speaker 425:48

We call most children, trembling lights and God's devotion.

Speaker 426:24

We are dead in your host.

Speaker 426:31

There's a storm here.

Speaker 326:42

T diam Patrem Colinus by the Choir of Moretlin College.

Speaker 326:48

Now you've just published a study of current spoken English, which has met with great success.

Robert Burchfield26:54

Yes. Well, in the book it is uh a formal description of the language from Anglo Saxon times to the present day, but a lot else besides. And I'm just a little anxious about the way that theoretical linguistics is taking the soul and the heart out of the English language. I feel that in my bones. I'm trying to restore some quality of imagination to the whole subject. It's too arid at the moment, too scientifically handled, as if the English language is a structure that can be compared with something that is mechanical.

Speaker 327:33

A few years ago the BBC commissioned some work from you on current spoken English in the world of broadcasting.

Robert Burchfield27:39

Hands.

Robert Burchfield27:40

That was very enjoyable indeed, to be asked to make remarks about famous announcers and their habits and so forth. And about the length of the habits. In broad terms I came out in favour, saying that the standard was exceedingly high.

Speaker 327:51

Yeah.

Robert Burchfield27:58

And there really wasn't any need to worry about it.

Robert Burchfield28:02

But I was asked if I would give a list of preferences for the way that some words are to be pronounced, and some preferences about grammatical matters, and also about the way words are used. And, roughly speaking, the book was an amazing success with the general public.

Robert Burchfield28:20

The announcers and the presenters, if they had by nineteen eighty one decided that it was controversy,

Robert Burchfield28:28

They read my book with great gravity, where I recommend controversy, and then they went on saying controversy, just as they did before. And if a disc jockey has always said this record gave great pleasure to Richard and I,

Robert Burchfield28:44

They keep on saying this record gave great pleasure to Richard and I, no matter what I said in the book.

Speaker 428:48

The map

Robert Burchfield28:50

So it was an engaging exercise, and British people are very ill disciplined in regard to language, and they won't take any notice of the likes of me, saying they should pronounce a word this way or that.

Robert Burchfield29:02

We got to record number seven.

Robert Burchfield29:04

Well, the seventh record is associated with nineteen seventy six, a rather dramatic year from my point of view, when my first marriage broke up.

Robert Burchfield29:12

and later in the year I remarried.

Robert Burchfield29:15

Elizabeth was working in London, I was working in Oxford.

Robert Burchfield29:19

I was flying up and down the M forty, and when I arrived, as often as not, I noticed that she had the Beggars' Opera playing on her record player, and

Robert Burchfield29:31

soon discerned that of all the ballads that MacHeath and Polly Peacham were playing, the one that she really loved was Were I Laid on Greenland's Coast, and that's the one that I've uh chosen.

Speaker 429:44

Were I laid on Greenland's coast, And in my arms embraced my lass, Woman meets eternal thrust, Fulful of his night would pass. Were I sold on Indian soil, Soon as the burning day was gold, I could warm the sun treated oil, When all my charmers blessed me home, I would love you more

Speaker 129:52

Uh

Speaker 129:55

Uh

Speaker 430:21

Over the hills and far away, Will I say for you next one And they was lost, I would miss my circle And makes me pros, I would love you all day.

Speaker 330:44

Were I Laid on Greenland's Coast from The Beggar's Opera, sung by John Cameron and Elsie Morrison.

Speaker 330:51

Doctor Birchfield, your capabilities as a castaway I mean, we think of New Zealanders as open-air people who do a lot of camping out and canoeing and that sort of thing. Would you be able to look after yourself? Oh, yes.

Robert Burchfield31:03

Oh yes, yes, anyone who slept in a tent in the snow in the mountains of Italy can look after himself for

Speaker 331:09

Commanders. And Uh

Robert Burchfield31:11

I need Tainting it.

Speaker 331:12

Yes. Done some fishing?

Robert Burchfield31:13

I fished as a boy, and I intensely annoyed a Middle English scholar friend of mine in Scilly Isles by going out fishing with him for mackerel. He was the expert, but I caught the fish.

Speaker 331:25

And the basic important question, would you try to escape? No.

Robert Burchfield31:29

No, and I answered that quite seriously, not frivolously. I lexicographers are by nature hermits. Nobody has particularly noticed this. But James Murray worked in a corrugated iron shed in his garden on his dictionary. Doctor Johnson worked in the garret when he was working on his dictionary. I worked in a tiny house, which I called disgracefully a hovel, in Walton Crescent, in Oxford, for some time. I was never happier than working in those circumstances. What project would you Uh

Speaker 332:02

Start work on.

Robert Burchfield32:03

On the island.

Robert Burchfield32:04

I would, I think, start to think about a manuscript that I worked on in the nineteen fifties, a Bodleian manuscript called Junius One. Its real title is the Ormulum because it was written by a man called Orme, and it's written in a semi-phonetic script, so that you know how he probably pronounced the words in twelve hundred in Lincoln or thereabouts. I would work away at that. A modern translation? No, I would work away at what English was like grammatically, syntactically, and in terms of its pronunciation and its vocabulary in twelve hundred. I would endeavour to complete the work. One needs total peace, no interruptions, no birds singing, nothing.

Speaker 332:53

Can't guarantee you all that. I was going to offer you one luxury. Would you like to borrow that manuscript from the Bodleian as your luxury?

Robert Burchfield33:01

Yes, that would be my luxury MS. Junior's one, which I could pore over without fear of anyone wanting to look at it, to poke about with it. It would be mine.

Speaker 333:11

Heaven's sake, take care.

Robert Burchfield33:13

What's your

Speaker 333:13

What was your house track or?

Robert Burchfield33:15

Well, in nineteen eighty five I think anybody's choice must be the remarkable Handel. It is his tercent Henry, born in sixteen eighty five.

Robert Burchfield33:26

And out of his prodigious works, because of the associations of it, and because Kiri Te Kanawa is the singer,

Robert Burchfield33:36

A country woman of Milan from New Zealand.

Robert Burchfield33:38

Lead the Bright Seraphim.

Speaker 433:50

A police dealing with your tremendous

Speaker 433:58

Yeah, to the

Speaker 334:40

Handel's Let the Bright Seraphin, sung by Kiri Tekatama.

Speaker 334:45

If you could take only one disc, which would it be? It would have to be the trout. Your luxury we've heard about. Now one book apart from the Bible and complete works of Shakspere.

Robert Burchfield34:56

It's very difficult to choose one book, but I think my choice would be Plato's Republic, with the Greek on one side and the English on the other, one of the greatest books ever written.

Speaker 335:08

Right.

Speaker 335:09

And thank you, Dr. Robert Birchfield, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs.

Robert Burchfield35:13

Thank you very much indeed. I've enjoyed it immensely.

Speaker 335:16

Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 135:24

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.