Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Historian, biographer, poet and essayist, known for his works on Elizabethan England and Shakespeare.
On the island
Eight records
Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in D major, BWV 1050
Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra conducted by Karl Münchinger
I can't imagine anything more blithe and joyous and cheerful than Bach's Brandenburg concertos. What about number five, which is positively blithe?
Agnus Dei from Mass for Five Voices
Choir of Christ Church, Oxford directed by Simon Preston
the greatest of all the Elizabethan composers. His five-part Mass is one of the greatest works in English music, and I should like to choose the Agnus Dei from that.
the most wonderful, nostalgic voice of a Scottish singer, Maggie Tate, who had all her training in France, and nobody has really sung De Bussy and Du Parc as she has done.
Piano Sonata No. 30 in E major, Op. 109
I could play some of the slow movements of Beethoven… I should like to hear very much a hundred and nine, it would really uh give me happiness on my island.
New York Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein
I adore the dance music, the ballet music of Tchaikovsky… specially appealed to me for their combination of rhythm with extreme charm.
Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85
I have a particular feeling for Elgar… especially about this wonderful work, the cello concerto.
Death by Water (from The Waste Land)
Eliot was awfully kind to me in my young years. He was the person who first published my poems, and actually wrote the blurbs of the first two or three volumes.
In conversation
Presenter asks
3:04How do you look back on your childhood? Was it a happy childhood?
I think it was rather a lonely childhood… My people were awfully hard-working. My father, about 1922, I think, got the magnificent wages of two pounds two shillings a week. But he had set on a little shop which helped out, and I used to help in that. So that in fact we were brought up rather better off than the ordinary village people… I wasn't any good at games, but I loved being at school… I was a choir boy… I really owed a great deal to the church, because that really gave me my introduction to music.
Presenter asks
6:42How did you envisage your future at that time, as a writer, as an academic, as a teacher?
Oh, I think quite definitely I thought of myself always, really, as a writer. Yes, I really had started publishing verse when I was a boy at school, you know, in anthologies called public school verse, though my small Cornish grammar school was not at all a public school.
Presenter asks
10:07To stay on at one's university so long, isn't it rather like staying in the womb?
Well, I think you're right about that. I think I owed an enormous amount to all souls, you know. I hope you'll think, on the other hand, as I really frequently did think myself, that I rather justified this position by working very hard and rarely producing the goods as far as I was able.
The keepsakes
The book
Marcel Proust
It has the whole world in it. It has humour, it has poetry, it has botany, it has criticism, both social and literary. I think that it would stand me in very good stead.
The luxury
I opt for one of the greatest pictures in the modern world, Seurat's picture in the Chicago Art Institute of Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte. It specially speaks to me as it used to speak to Tom Elliott [T.S. Eliot]. Every time he was in Chicago, he used to go and stand there for twenty minutes or so looking at it, and so also do I.
Presenter asks
13:37You claim to have discovered the identity of the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. How did you do that?
Well, it's not very surprising, after all, since I've spent the whole of my life researching into the Elizabethan age, but nothing was really known about her until I really got down to the manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, the very place where, if anything was to be found about her, she would be. And this woman turned out to be the discarded mistress of the Lord Chamberlain himself, the patron of Shakespeare's company.
Presenter asks
16:29What is your best time for working, doctor Rowse?
Well, I think I have two times in the day. I think in the morning, though I like to be pepped up by coffee in the middle of the morning. And I adore the tea hour and writing from, say, about 4.30 to 7 or 7.30.
Presenter asks
16:48What is your work in progress?
Well, you won't be surprised if I tell you that it has a certain Cornish interest. Most people don't realise, you know, that the poet Byron was descended from the Cornish Trevannians who are just next door to me here. And once more, curiosity and inquisitiveness, I'm engaged in tracking all this down in the Trevannions, who are fascinating Cornish family. Wish I belonged to them, I must say.
“I think it was rather a lonely childhood.”
“I think quite definitely I thought of myself always, really, as a writer.”
“I think I owed an enormous amount to all souls.”
“I think I should rather qualify for your island rather better than most, you know. I think I could promise you not to go completely dotty.”
“It would have to be the Bird five part mass.”