Norman Lewis

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty six, and the presenter was Michael Parkinson.

Presenter0:30

It's more than likely that our castaway will already have visited whichever desert island we banish him to. He spent a lifetime travelling the world and writing about it quite brilliantly in books like Naples Forty Four, Voices of the Old Sea, and The Golden Earth. His book about the Mafia called The Honour Society and his novel on the same theme, The Sicilian Specialist, mark him as a writer of unusual range and talent. The critic Cyril Connolly said he was talented enough to make even describing a lorry interesting. And V. S. Pritchett said he goes in deep, like a sharp, polished knife.

Presenter1:01

His life has been an extraordinary one, described in a remarkable volume of memoirs called Jack Daw Cake, the author, Norman Lewis.

Presenter1:09

No one

Presenter1:09

Reading your book one gets a sense that you're a born traveller, that you always wanted to move around the world. Do you daydream as a child about faraway places?

Norman Lewis1:17

Be sure I daydreamed as a child about faraway places and I can give you an idea why. I had the fortune or misfortune to be largely brought up by three aunts most people would have considered extremely mad. And they kept me in a kind of subjection in a fairly large house in a remote country town called Cormarthen Welsh Town. And I did daydream about travelling continually. So the very first opportunity came to travel, I travelled. But why would we think of them as mad? I mean what was peculiar about them? First of all, they weren't spectacularly mad. I mean they didn't imagine they were poached eggs or anything like that. But the oldest one, Polly, had had one epileptic fit every day of her life, poor thing. And this had removed all the skin of her face, which had been replaced by pieces torn off various parts of her body, none of which matched, by the way. Some were white and some were red and some were matte and some were glossy. And she couldn't close her eyes. And I could only understand with great difficulty what she said, because her vocal cords had been affected by the fire. She was just an afflicted woman. But the youngest aunt wept all the time.

Presenter1:51

Yeah.

Norman Lewis2:29

And the intermediate aunt laughed all the time and dressed up as a Cossack or something like that, you see.

Norman Lewis2:35

So I had a problem on various levels there.

Presenter2:39

and this instilled in you a need to travel.

Presenter2:42

I believe it must be.

Norman Lewis2:42

I believe it must have done. You say daydream. Undoubtedly in a situation like you do daydream, because of nothing else you can pretty well do.

Presenter2:50

Let's then have a first choice of music from you, Norman. What does that to be?

Norman Lewis2:54

Well, I like to make this Mozart's clarinet concerto in A major, the reason being that I grew to appreciate it very much, because a friend of mine who was recovering from the Spanish Civil War, where he'd been wounded on numerous occasions, used to play this continually when I saw him in his fat and it has these kind of nostalgic associations.

Presenter4:07

Norman, you've talked about your three peculiar aunties, but things weren't too normal at home either, were they? I mean your father was a an extraordinary man as well.

Norman Lewis4:15

My father was a spiritualist medium and a very good one. I mean I've been to a spiritualist seance lately and there's just simply nothing in it. I mean there's no drama at all. Now he used to put on a dramatic performance. He used to go off into a trance and it was quite shocking or could be a stirring experience. People used to come to see him in a very sceptical frame of mind but by heavens he converted them to spiritualism by the time all this was over. Their dad used to call to them in recognisable voices through his mouth. But I found this extremely embarrassing as a child and although I was forced to take part in some of those seances, when he used to throw a seance as he frequently did at lunch, sort of when we had friends in, I would then get under the table and stay under the table until it was over.

Presenter4:58

What's your attitude towards spiritualism now, then?

Norman Lewis5:00

Well, I regret that I am generally speaking a sceptic, and that actually applies to spiritualism as well. But I think I have every right to in this particular case. Your father wasn't a a full-time spiritualist, was he? He was a chemist. He was a druggist. He used to make up medicines and he didn't believe in any of them, of course. And he used to, when people brought him in prescriptions to be dispensed, he used to say, Well, now I must tell you something before I make this up for you. That is, if you take it, at the very least it will do you no good, but probably it will harm you, so I recommend you not to take it. So as a result, of course, he was very short of custom.

Presenter5:11

Yeah.

Norman Lewis5:35

He invented a

Presenter5:35

His own medicine though, didn't

Norman Lewis5:36

Yes, he've invented a an elixir.

Presenter5:36

Yes, he

Norman Lewis5:39

I think it was a mixture of garlic and water, with a faint touch of cranin to make it taste really desperately bitter, because he always believed that if medicine was really atrocious, therefore people believed in it more and it did them good. Because according to him, only faith really healed you. I think he had something there too.

Presenter5:57

Coming from this strange kind of background, what were your first sort of instincts, apart from leaving home, wanting to go away from it? I mean, w w what do you want to do in the professional sense? Did you want to be a writer? Did you want to be a pharmacist?

Norman Lewis6:01

Yeah.

Norman Lewis6:06

Quite soon I wanted to be a writer. I found really that the only thing I could do was to win compensation prizes in literary contests. I won a very large number of them. I would enter, say, fifteen or twenty little contests per week and win three or four compensation prizes, which amounted to five shillings in those days, which considerably augmented my very slender income. But I gradually got to like writing very much. I became addicted, just as you do to anything else eventually. I'm a writer, just as I might be a smoker.

Presenter6:39

But I think I'm right in saying that your first job or your first area where you earned money was in fact working for your father, wasn't it?

Norman Lewis6:44

Yes, yes. I used to make up his noxious medicines. He used to pay me about twopence a dozen to make up these these bottles of medicine, and that was my main source of income.

Presenter6:44

Yes, yes.

Norman Lewis6:55

Let's have a second choice of music. Well, I'd like to make this Stravenski's Petrushka.

Norman Lewis7:00

of which I am particularly fond because I regard it as a really iconoclastic piece of music, and being a bit of iconoclast myself, it sort of seated my frame of mind.

Presenter8:09

Norman, apart from all the ambitions to be a writer, it seems to me that as a young man you were an extremely successful potential businessman, because I think I'm right in saying you set off with a camera shop and you became a chain of camera shops.

Norman Lewis8:20

I keep quiet about that. I say very little about it at all. I I'm really quite ashamed of the fact that I have this kind of business acumen. I try to hide this particular light under a bushel.

Presenter8:30

But did you go to business to raise money to enable you to travel?

Norman Lewis8:32

Yes, this is the idea, yes. And I was successful in doing so.

Presenter8:37

What decided where you went? Did you have a a plan of places you wanted to go to?

Norman Lewis8:41

No, I think I'm a very unplanned person. I just suddenly decide I'll go somewhere and I go there. And I think in this particular occasion I went to southern Arabia and I got a dhow and travel around and the dow. But um I'm sure I sort of made up my mind a week or two earlier to do this. And in those days of course it wasn't so hard to travel as it is now. You don't have to get the visas and all that kind of thing. You just went.

Presenter9:07

So I just went off on this trip. But when you went to Arabia, was that in fact with a view to writing about it, or was it just travelling?

Norman Lewis9:12

What about

Norman Lewis9:14

It was just travelling, absolutely pure and simple, the purest form of travel. And only when I had been through numerous small adventures, including, by the way, being on the famous desert island for a short time. Where was this? Cameron. This, by the way, is in the Red Sea, and it's described officially by the Red Sea pilot as a desert island, although, generally speaking, there are a few pearl fishermen on it.

Presenter9:29

Chris Paulo.

Norman Lewis9:40

But it was something to write about, being on a desert island. I was only there a short time. But when I came back I wrote a devastatingly terrible book of juvenilia about these experiences. That was the first writing.

Presenter9:53

You also around about this time too in the in the very early days, b before the war, you went to Cuba for the first time, didn't you? Now that became a country that you became very fond of. You visited about half a dozen times in your life.

Norman Lewis10:03

Why was that?

Norman Lewis10:05

Well, I went there in the first place. Uh see, I married a Sicilian girl who had very, very strong Spanish contacts. And I think that she decided that she would like to go and visit Cuba, and I really tagged along with her. She had friends there. But when we got there, it was a place of such stupendous beauty, such drama, such music everywhere, that I went back whenever I could. And I think I have been probably six times in all, three times by the way, for the Sunday Times, doing journalistic trips there. I believe you got to know Castro as well, didn't you? No, alas I didn't. I tried to. I was all fixed up. I would go and see Castro, but I was arrested by Batista's police in the middle of the trip, and so that came to an end.

Presenter10:50

Yeah. You certainly met Hemiway there, didn't you?

Norman Lewis10:52

Yes, I met Hemingway under extraordinary circumstances. I had a letter of introduction to him, and I was asked to go and see him by Ian Fleming, who was a friend of mine in those days. And Fleming believed that Hemingway knew what was going to happen in Cuba and could foretell the outcome of the war. So I went to see Hemingway, but unfortunately, I also had a letter of introduction to a man called Edward Scott, who had challenged Hemingway to duel in the previous week. Why? Well, apparently there'd been some fracon at the British Embassy. There'd been a party, I think, the Queen's birthday or something like that. And Hemingway had gone there with Ava Gardner, who in a high-spirited moment had taken off one of her nether garments and waved it at the assembled crowd. And Scott, who was ardently pro-British, very much disliked this conduct, and challenged Hemingway about it and told Hemingway to take the lady away. So Hemingway struck out at Scott, and Scott immediately challenged him to duel.

Presenter11:53

The heavy wood

Norman Lewis11:58

So when I arrived, all this thing had blown up very, very strongly, and I went to see Hemingway. And in the course of our conversation, he said, You realise I've been challenged to a duel, so I said, Yes. So he said, Scott, he wants to fight with pistols. Do you think he's much of a shot? So I said, No, I've seen him in action. He couldn't hit the side of a bomb. And Hemingway, far from being cheered up by that, still obviously had severe misapprehensions, and wrote a letter to the local newspaper and called the thing off, saying that he owed it to his reading public not to get himself killed in a duel. That's rather disappointing, wasn't it? Wasn't it a good idea? What do you make of him? Because a lot of people were. He was the saddest man I ever met. Really? He was a man absolutely consumed with sorrow. When I went to see him, he was doing an extraordinary thing. He was in bed, and he got out of bed and poured me a drink, and he poured himself a half pint of Dubonnet.

Presenter12:34

Well we're just matching.

Norman Lewis12:53

Dubonnet of all things and a moment or later he he he drank that and poured himself another half pint of Dubonnet, so obviously he smashed his liver to pieces. But apart from that he was very, very sad, and every moment I thought he was going to burst into tears when he was talking to me. He was obviously in a state of extreme depression. This was about a year before he committed suicide.

Norman Lewis13:14

Let's have another choice of music, Nolan.

Norman Lewis13:17

Well, I think as we've been talking about Cuba, it might be Guantanamera, which, by the way, was, in my opinion, a stupendous piece of folk music, improvised originally, just a Tribal came out with it and somebody just wrote it down, but then it became rather a sort of a nationalistic classic.

Speaker 413:47

One better

Speaker 413:51

Wahira wants an American

Speaker 413:55

Uh

Speaker 413:56

Want.

Norman Lewis13:59

Why here?

Presenter14:01

Norman Lewis, reading your autobiography, Jack Dor Kick, I'm struck by the number of eccentrics that come leaping out of the page of me. I mean, do you think that certain people collect eccentrics, and you might be one of them?

Norman Lewis14:13

Uh

Presenter14:13

Drop.

Norman Lewis14:13

Brother. But Yes, I think that I attract them as a magnet does. I th th they flock in my direction. Why? Have you ever worked to tell? First of all, I think they realize that I am not an aggressive person, that they can do what they like with me, they can play me around, and I I just obviously like them.

Presenter14:28

We've talked about your aunts and and your father. Now what a

Norman Lewis14:30

But

Presenter14:31

Uh

Norman Lewis14:31

The army, because that was rich in eccentrics, wasn't it? I spent most of the time abroad in Naples. And at this point I should say that Naples is my favorite city. It is not dirty or not very. The people are extremely calm, they're extremely kindly, very brave and very, very amusing.

Presenter14:33

Okay, so

Presenter14:49

Decomm. But back to the eccentrics you met in the army, because you were in a branch of intelligence, Bernie, Field Security, I think it was called.

Norman Lewis14:55

Bill.

Presenter14:56

You had a a couple of of officers you met there who come out the page of the book as being exceedingly eccentric.

Norman Lewis14:56

And it goes.

Norman Lewis15:01

The first officer I was with, first of all he changed his name. He started to call himself Captain Flitz Clarence, and he ordered us all to refer to him as Captain Flitzclarence. This itself struck me as an extraordinary thing.

Norman Lewis15:14

But gradually he became more and more eccentric and was seen less and less about the place. And in the end, at a time when I happened to be away from the section headquarters, he one day got all the sergeants in we were all sergeants and he was stark naked. And he harangued my friends on one subject or another, and then told them he was going to shoot one of them and shoot himself. But in the meanwhile, one of them managed to get out and telephoned to the local GHQ and got a doctor down with a man with a rifle and they took him away.

Presenter15:47

Now you mentioned that Naples was in fact your favorite places in the entire world. Now you were there during the war. You wrote a book later about it called Naples Forty Four. One of the great obsessions of of your writing has been with the Mafia. You've written two wonderful books about it, one a novel and uh and one not a novel, and a documentary.

Presenter16:03

Was it then in Naples that you first came across and became interested in the Mafia?

Presenter16:07

Yeah.

Norman Lewis16:07

The local version of the Mafia was known as the Camora, but they were indistinguishable in their behaviour from the actual Sicilian Mafia, and they obviously worked in conjunction with the Sicilian Mafia. Moreover, we had an extraordinary situation in Naples, because one of the chiefs of the American Mafia had gone to Naples before it was occupied by the Allies, and as soon as the Allies occupied it, he chummed up with the head of the Allied military government, and between the Allied military government and the Mafia, they practically took Naples over.

Presenter16:45

Same

Norman Lewis16:45

From the Mafia will put in Yeah. By the American government, basically. Yes, you see, the members of the Allied military government, which in fact was an American military government, they were almost exclusively people of Italian origin in the States. They all came over speaking perfectly Italian, they had their connections there, and they were largely connected with the criminal class there. That is why, both in Naples and in Sicily, as soon as we arrived there, we were more or less under the Allied military government who

Presenter16:48

They have to run it.

Norman Lewis17:15

appointed all the local mayors from the members of the Camora in Naples or the Mafia in Sicily.

Presenter17:22

Why would they put in charge people who they knew were criminals?

Norman Lewis17:25

Well, because they were criminals themselves, Larity. This is this is an absolute positive fact. I mean, the head of AMG was a highly suspect person. He had uh very strong connections in in the Mafia sphere.

Presenter17:39

Let's talk some more about the map in a moment. Let's now go to another choice of record.

Norman Lewis17:44

Well, I think as we're talking about Naples, I have been talking about Naples, I think La Mattinata.

Speaker 417:49

No rorian covet.

Speaker 417:54

Jaro shodis current, ya con lez es meditar charezari losu tomosoda tre to a cro y notor no treado japar eturontida estierine visto quido enta

Speaker 418:33

Metiankula, estadiyanta, es pulido sho a la tuo karatora.

Presenter18:47

The voice of Luciano Pavrotti. Our castaway to speak is Norman Lewis, the novelist, travel writer and journalist. Norman, as I said, you've written two books about the mafia, The Honored Society, which was an investigation into the mafia and its origins, and The Sicilian Specialist, which was in fact uh a novel about it. How difficult was it for you as an outsider to gain access to this the most extraordinary difficult of uh organisations to penetrate, one would imagine?

Norman Lewis19:11

Well, I was only 95% an outsider. I had married a Sicilian wife, and as a result, I had certain family or in-law connections in Sicily. This helped, it didn't help a great deal, but it got me into situations that otherwise it would have been more difficult to penetrate. Of course, the further I got into it, the more interested I became, the more people I saw, the more I investigated. And in the end, I was able to write these two books on that theme. How powerful is it today? Far more powerful than it ever has been before, which is something extraordinary.

Presenter19:45

Which is how extraordinary, really. Can you give us an indication of what?

Norman Lewis19:48

Well I was last in Sicily last year and for example I was driving with a Sicilian professor of English language by the way in Palermo and we suddenly came to an area in the street which completely blacked out and we drove on with some difficulty because all the Sicilians drive at full throttle whether it's darkness or whether it's not darkness and we drove on for perhaps quarter of a mile or half a mile and the lights came on again.

Norman Lewis20:15

She drove into a cafe and we had a drink and she said, Well, the trouble is that the Palermo Power, the electric light company, or there are several companies that are all controlled by members of the Mafia. In this particular case, somebody had got a concession who was not a member of the Mafia, and a few weeks before, his brains had been blown out. And while the other companies were deciding who should take over his allocation, that part of the town was in darkness. But this you run it all the time.

Presenter20:46

out of business then are they purely uh cosmetic basically?

Norman Lewis20:50

I think they try quite hard, but the people that make these attempts are inevitably killed, so in the end they become discouraged. Two of my friends have been shot dead.

Presenter20:58

You moved from Naples after the war. You moved and went to live in Spain for for three years. So let's talk about that a while. You lived in a fishing village in Spain. You wrote a book about it called Voices of the Old Sea. Again, it was a a close society, wasn't it? Have you got a a kind of empathy with with close societies, do you think?

Norman Lewis21:14

I think you just have to go in and try very hard, that's all. They had their very special local customs. For example, what I did there, I noticed that the fishermen had a lot of trouble with their boats, beaching them in heavy seas and things like that. And what I did first was I went down to the beach and helped people pull their boats in. And gradually, on the basis of that, next time I went into a bar with a fisherman whose boat I just helped put out of the water, he would buy me a drink, and that's how it started.

Presenter21:42

Can we have a musical memory now, perhaps, of that period in your life?

Norman Lewis21:45

Well I think I would like to have La Nina de los Penes singing Saetas and let me explain that this is a highly improvised thing. La Nina de los Penes was accepted as the greatest flamenca singer of this century and the song that she will now sing is The Honor of the Virgin in the Spanish procession, the Easter week and she improvises both the music and the words. It has to be that way.

Presenter22:45

There was a smile of great contentment on your face, there, Norman, when that lady was singing. Is that your favourite kind of music?

Presenter22:50

Or th

Norman Lewis22:50

I think so, yes, yes. I used to try very hard at it, but in the end I became addicted and I I really adore Cantiflamenco. That, by the way, we've just heard is a classic form. This is a very austere, non-vulgarized version of Cantiflamenco.

Presenter23:06

Talking about non-vulgarization, in fact, you went back, did you not, to the village that was a sleepy fishing village where you wrote the book. You went back some time later. What had happened to it?

Norman Lewis23:15

It was so horrific I couldn't even stay the night. I arrived there, I went round the place and there were awful things happening like they'd staged an Imitation Rodeo and all sorts of things like that. And I decided that I wouldn't stay the night there. And I drove only five miles out of the town, possibly even three, back instantly into an authentic Spanish atmosphere where the people behave like Spaniards, where you didn't hear a foreign voice at all. And it was really marvellous and stayed the night in the village inn.

Presenter23:44

This change, does it make it more difficult for you to write the way that you used to write about about uh not really?

Norman Lewis23:49

Uh not really, because what I do is just to go a bit further every time. So I'm I'm ahead of this kind of change usually by Europe. Turn. Uh

Presenter23:57

You've chosen, I see, a bit of Indian music for your next uh record. Is that a a memory of a of a favoured place?

Norman Lewis24:04

Yes, I spent some time in India, a very short time actually, about thirty years ago, when somebody told me I needed to be more spiritual in my attitudes, and I agreed with them. And I went down and I stayed in an ashram in southern India in Pondicherry. It was called the ashram of Sri Aurobindo, where I squatted on the ground with the other inmates and ate curried vegetables with one hand. It was a very, very pleasant experience, although I don't think that spiritually really had much effect after all.

Presenter24:35

Who were the other inmates, though? Were they rich Europeans?

Norman Lewis24:37

They were rich. They were nearly all of them, rich, upper class, and very well educated English people. There were a few French people. And they went there to be benefited spiritually, of course, just as I did. And whereas I used to pay three pounds a day and bought them excellent accommodation, they paid nothing. That was all part of the thing. But they would have to work for probably about ten hours in the sunshine, boiling heat, and eat insufficient food. And as a result, they were all as thin as scarecrows, and they look like the inmates of Japanese PW camp.

Presenter25:08

Right, so this music is a reminder of that time.

Speaker 425:31

Yeah.

Speaker 425:34

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Presenter25:39

Norman, you've written twelve novels. You've written six works of non-fiction, and then all your words of journalism. We've been talking about a changing world.

Presenter25:47

Do you think that anything you've written has changed anything?

Norman Lewis25:50

Yeah.

Norman Lewis25:51

I'm sure that on one occasion this has been the case. I went to Brazil in 1968 for the Sunday Times. There was some possibility of a scandalous situation with the Indians there. When I arrived, it turned out that they were massacred in large numbers. What was happening was that the local landowners and the cattle ranchers were trying to take over their land. And in order to do this, they were employing gangsters of all kinds. They were having the areas bombed. They were throwing down sweets and sugar, which had been treated with arsenic. They were handing out clothes through pseudo-aid organisations, clothes infested with the germs of deadly diseases. And they were actually sending gangsters in, gunmen, to machine gun these people down. So the Indians were being killed at such a rate at that time that it was estimated that there wouldn't be an Indian left alive in South America within the next 20 years. So I wrote for the Sunday Times, I believe, the largest article certainly that the colour supplement ever published. It amounted to nearly 15,000 words. And much to my amazement and of course delight, this stirred up a great controversy and a great deal of indignation. And as a result, a number of societies were formed with the object of protecting the Indians, including the Survivor International, the English one.

Presenter27:15

Let's have another choice of record.

Norman Lewis27:17

Well, I like Handel Zadok the Priest.

Norman Lewis27:20

which reminds me very much of the period when I used to go imploring my friends to educate me in one way or another. And a man did his best at those days to take over my musical education, and he was always playing choral music, and this is one that stands out in my memory.

Speaker 427:53

Oh no, that's

Speaker 427:57

Rejoice!

Speaker 428:04

Rechoice!

Speaker 428:07

Make choice

Presenter28:38

Norman, what sort of plans have you got now for the future for writing? What are you working on at present?

Norman Lewis28:43

I finished a novel about ten days ago, and I'm in a state of muddled euphoria. That's to say, I can't make up my mind whether I'm happy about it, or I feel extremely restless. My intention was to write, from my point of view, a long and possibly a major travel book in the winter, but I probably will become so restless before then that I shall set out on something else and try and put in the time in that way.

Presenter29:07

But you don't have a destination in mind at present?

Norman Lewis29:09

I will eventually go to Indonesia at this moment.

Presenter29:11

Yeah.

Norman Lewis29:12

Well, it strikes me as a place where a lot of things are happening. It's about like Brazil was twenty-five years ago. The country's been overrun by exploiters of various kinds of timber cutters and all that kind of thing. You've got some fantastic Stone Age tribes there which are in danger of extermination. Places like West Irian, I think, should really be visited. This is a very large area, a vast, vast island. And I think I would like to get there quickly before it's totally deforested and totally colonized and place on record some of the things that exist there now.

Presenter29:46

Can you imagine ever a time in your life when you get sick and tired of travel?

Norman Lewis29:51

Well, I can't imagine it. I suppose it can happen, but I sincerely hope that I'll uh meet wi with a merciful motor car accident before that, huh?

Presenter29:59

Let's have a final choice of record, record number 8. What is it to be?

Norman Lewis30:02

Andean flute music. This really is something I experienced a couple of years ago when I went to Bolivia and I was up in the Andes and I came upon a group of Indians, Aymari Indians, absolutely besotted and enthralled with drink. They were rapturously drunk on one small bottle of beer each and they just killed a llama and the preferred guests were eating a llama's liver and then they broke into the marvellous dance to this flute music.

Presenter31:06

So, Norman, you're now on our desert island. Do you think you'll try to escape?

Norman Lewis31:09

Yeah.

Presenter31:09

Probably if the opportunity offered itself, yes.

Presenter31:13

Are you self sufficient? I mean, could you look after yourself while you were there?

Norman Lewis31:16

Yes, but let me explain what it's like. Having been on one for a matter of days, you can't eat anything but fish. Nothing grows there at all, you see. And if you're not an expert fisherman, all you will eat is shellfish. Now, you can actually grope around on the place and you can get squid and you can get octopus. This can be done because I've done it. But on the whole, they are not attractive in flavour.

Norman Lewis31:38

So you have this dietetic problem. So naturally you want to get away in the direction of fresh vegetables and meat as soon as possible.

Presenter31:44

The nearest five-star restaurant, yes, right. While you're there though, for the period you're there, what about the book? What book would you want to read?

Norman Lewis31:45

Five star restaurant

Norman Lewis31:51

Undoubtedly, Herodotus' histories. First of all, it's immensely long, which is above 600 pages of it.

Norman Lewis31:57

He's undoubtedly the most brilliant and most extraordinary travel writer that ever wrote a book. This book was written at about 450 B C, but it's written by an absolutely modern man, who even when he's travelling around notices the fact that the local boys have Mohican haircuts, with a tuft of hair in the top and the side shaved away. It's very, very amusing. I would really recommend you to read it.

Presenter32:23

What about the one record? Im imagine that seven have disappeared somehow. It's a natural disaster. You've got one record of the eight you've chosen, which would that be?

Norman Lewis32:30

It has to be Petrushka.

Presenter32:32

And what about the luxury object these are

Norman Lewis32:34

It has to be in this case a spirit stove, because if you're limited indefinitely to a diet of a squid and octopus, it'd be an enormous advantage to be able to cook them.

Presenter32:46

You need an enormous drill as well.

Norman Lewis32:47

Yeah.

Presenter32:50

Yeah.

Norman Lewis32:50

Uh

Presenter32:50

Norman Lewis, thank you very much indeed. Thank you very much.

Speaker 332:59

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