Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A historian who popularized English monarchy on TV and was called the 'rudest man in Britain' for his Moral Maze radio performances.
On the island
Eight records
Glenda Simpson with the Camerata of London directed by Barry Mason
He is a perpetually inexhaustible subject. He is the central king in English history. He is the fulcrum round which our world revolves.
Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, Z. 860: March
I first heard it played in the extraordinary huge spaces, five aisles wide, of Kendall Parish Church, where those trombones echoed like the last trumpet.
Don Carlos: Act II: "Dio, che nell'alma infondere"
It's a male duet between Don Carlos and his friend Rodrigo, and in my wicked days on the London scene, which my mother so disapproved of, we used to refer to this as the gay national anthem.
New London Consort conducted by Philip Pickett
It is the first record that I and my partner bought together. So this is, oh God, our tune.
Oboe Quartet in F major, K. 370: II. Adagio
Lothar Koch with the Amadeus Quartet
I first heard [it] just before I went to Cambridge in the grounds of the Archbishop's Palace at Tours, an eighteenth century building, an eighteenth century garden, a summer's evening, and this music wafting through the scents of the Loire Valley.
The Marriage of Figaro, K. 492: "Dove sono i bei momenti"Favourite
Kiri Te Kanawa with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Georg Solti
It's languorous, sad, but only half serious.
L'incoronazione di Poppea: "Pur ti miro, pur ti godo"
Magda László & Richard Lewis with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by John Pritchard
It's a love duet of the most complete beauty and the most absolute total cynicism, just like Diana.
The English Concert Choir with The English Concert directed by Trevor Pinnock
I first really listened to the words when I was in the chapel of King's College at Cambridge. The words King of King and Lord of Lords rang out, and I realized it wasn't about Christianity at all. It was all about monarchy.
In conversation
Presenter asks
7:50How had [academic life] become unpleasant?
Academic life has got a dangerously self-destructive quality about it. You have all these immensely intelligent people, badly underpaid and much of the time rather seriously underemployed, all exercising their talents upon, or I should say not so much talents as talons on each other. A dear friend of mine, Kevin Sharp, says that the collective noun for a group of historians should be a malice of historians … and I got sick of it.
Presenter asks
10:38Tell me where and how you lived [in Kendal].
We were born in a little council house. It had a through-living room, a kitchen in which there was the only sink in the house there was a bathroom downstairs, and a main bedroom upstairs the small bedroom at the front, where I was, and the l slightly larger bedroom at the back, which was my grandfather's.
Presenter asks
15:04Tell me about the strongest woman of all in your life, your mother.
She'd waited a long time for me. She knew she would never have another child. She was desperately worried that I had been born disabled. She was also protecting me from the fact they were poor. They went without. I didn't. … I have the most idyllic memories of childhood. Then you begin the process of separation and becoming your own person, which, you know, begins with rebellion, turns into dishonesty, awful dishonesty, and finally culminates in something like dislike.
The keepsakes
The book
F. M. Cornford
It's wonderful. It will remind me of why I am quite happy to have left it all behind, but it will remind me with a smile and in beautiful language.
Presenter asks
19:44How would you characterize your relationship with [G. R. Elton] at that point?
At that point, very good. … I think that's absolutely right. And my eventual dispute with Geoffrey was in one sense, I suppose, like the breach with my mother. It was becoming my own man. Geoffrey was suffocating. … Geoffrey was, in a sense, the kind of domineering father that I had never had, and, I suppose, had to break from, in exactly the way that I broke from my mother.
Presenter asks
22:38What was the fundamental disagreement [between you and G. R. Elton]?
The fundamental disagreement was how people work. Geoffery believed that government, Tudor government, was essentially about institutions, about rules, about modernity. I believe that most government in most periods is about people. Because what I think government is about is the backstairs.
“Talk is quick, is light flowing. It's there essentially to express the word that comes to you. Writing is quite different. Writing is the word that comes and then is rejected and is thought about and tried again. It's the ultimate vanity of the author.”
“There is a certain smell of blood, that's quite true. And I'm afraid when I got going on some of my rants on the moral maze, because that's what they were, I was uncontrollable for the very simple reason. It's a kind of adrenaline driven drug.”
“I actually believe that's where history belongs. The idea that history belongs only to the academic community is a disaster. Great historians are people like Macaulay, like Carlyle, like Gibbon, who are not within universities, who write for everybody, write to be understood by everybody.”