Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A writer and literary biographer, best known for her Whitbread Prize-winning biography of Mary Wollstonecraft.
On the island
Eight records
Richard Lloyd Morgan & Bill Lloyd
This is my mother's setting of Yeats's poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree.
The Marriage of Figaro: Sull'aria... che soave zeffiretto
Graziella Sciutti & Sena Jurinac with the Glyndebourne Festival Orchestra, conducted by Vittorio Gui
The Marriage of Figaro, the greatest opera ever written. It's written at the time of the French Revolution. It tells us about how wit and brains are more important than class and rank.
Bach Goldberg Variations, perhaps the piece of music I listen to more than any other. There is something so in a way abstract about it is like a piece of abstract sculpture.
Ella Fitzgerald, one of the great, great voices of the century, Cole Porter, one of the great writers of lyrics and of music. And in the still of the night is I thought of having one of his light, witty songs, but this song is raw emotion.
Martin Jarvis reading one of my husband Michael Frain's columns, and it's about just trying to set off from the house and how one always finds one has forgotten something.
String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, D. 810 'Death and the Maiden'
I chose Death and the Maiden with some difficulty, um and pain. Not just because it's such a great piece of music. Because I was thinking of my daughter who died young. My daughter Susannah...
I've chosen Derek Jacoby reading from the Iliad for several reasons, and one is because Michael and I listened to this recording when we were on holiday in Greece...
Sinfonia Concertante in B-flat major, Hob. I:105
Chamber Orchestra of the Saar, conducted by Karl Ristenpart
I chose it because it's a joyful piece of music. and Haydn wrote it when he was sixty, a Sinfonia Consertante for violin, cello, oboe, and bassoon.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:31Where's the fun, Clare? Where's the excitement that redeems the toil [of writing]?
Well, the fun is the research. A book starts because you're curious about something and you you want to explore it and you set off on this journey and um it's very often a journey in England because England is full of old papers.
Presenter asks
5:54Did she [your mother] go on composing when you were born? Do you remember her as a child at the piano?
Yes, I remember her very well. I think having two children put a great break on her um composing. She composed much less, but she did she did go on.
Presenter asks
15:28Why did you have [your first husband, Nick] back when he behaved so outrageously?
Yes, but he did love his children and. He did he did love me. Um and I had a great belief, I suppose, in the family life. ... I think overwhelmingly I thought, um, somehow the family mattered more than the relationship between him and me.
The keepsakes
The book
Samuel Pepys
They do give you ten years in the life of a young man of twenty seven... they are the nearest thing to entering into the life of some one else I have ever read.
The luxury
to make a garden is it involves all the things that you need to be using, hard work, muscle power, imagination, and a lot of hope and a lot of disappointment. So it's a very, very good emblem for life.
Presenter asks
Would you hate it if someone wrote your biography?
Michael, my husband says that nobody likes to be written about. I think it's quite true. I think you don't want to think that someone else is summing you up. ... I would never write about somebody still alive or even somebody recently alive. I think the distancing of history does make it a little less intrusive, a little less impertinent.
“My work is, I would say, just about as important to me as the love of my family.”
“Music allows you in some way to live with pain, I think, because even if you cry while you're listening to it, it contain it is a contained thing, the piece of music, and during the course of the music you live through that pain and then the music comes to an end.”
“I love the shapes and patterns of life, as you can probably tell, and I find it deeply pleasing that my granddaughter should play her grandfather's instrument.”