Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Novelist and historian known for her works on French history and novels about Scottish life.
On the island
Eight records
John Wilbraham, Academy of St Martin in the Fields, conducted by Neville Marriner
Well, if I'm cast up on this desert island, I think the first thing I should want to do is hear a Christian song of praise for deliverance from the deep.
Military Band, Drums and Pipes of the Gordon Highlanders
Now when I was a child in Aberdeen I used to be very thrilled when the Gordon Highlanders came marching up Union Street, their kilts swinging and their pipes and drums playing.
Because I think I'd be wandering in the halls of memory myself, like Orfeil, and I'd like to have this beautiful area sung to remind me of my own loved ones.
Now there wouldn't be just an awful lot to look at on this desert island, except the sea and the sky. And I think I would like to hear one of my favourite singers singing one of my favorite songs.
And I think I'd be a bit like that Japanese girl who was looking for her American to turn up. I'd always be hoping that one fine day I'd see a ship a sailing.
Now this is a rather special record. It's the song the Foreign Legion sang during the Algerian War. when General de Gaulle tried to humiliate them by disbanding them.
Mazurka (from A Life for the Tsar)
Monte Carlo National Opera Orchestra, conducted by Louis Frémaux
I became very interested in the arts in Imperial Russia, and indeed in the political thinking of post-imperial Russia. And so I should like my seventh record to be uh the great Matsurka From Grinka's opera A Life for the Tar.
La MarseillaiseFavourite
My last record is to be the greatest national anthem in the world, the embodiment of the spirit of the land which has meant so much to me.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:42Apart from your family and friends, what would you miss most in a prolonged isolation?
Well, and miss television very much, I think. … I'd miss going to libraries, reading and studying. And of course I'd miss the kind of life I lead in this world, which is moving very fast from one place to another place, one city to another city.
Presenter asks
3:16What was your thesis [for your doctorate]?
It is entitled Louis-Philippe King of the French.
Presenter asks
3:26What was your idea at that time, to become an academic?
Yes, I think when you're only twenty one you don't just make tremendous lot of plans for the future. I just went ahead and did the things that seemed most natural to me at that time. And I did become an academic, if being a university lecturer is an academic. I was that, both at Aberdeen University and at Glasgow University.
Presenter asks
8:14The keepsakes
The book
Queen Victoria
the work that really turned my mind to the study of history when I was very young. It's endlessly fascinating
The luxury
How did you manage [to become a war correspondent]?
Well, I was the lucky one, I think, really. We after Paris was liberated, a group of eight women reporters left from London to go to Paris. and it was understood that one would receive what they called a permanent accreditation … I was the fortunate one who stayed behind.
Presenter asks
20:40How do you write? Do you write in bursts, or do you write so many hours a day, or how does it work out?
Oh, once I've started the actual writing I I write straight on. I work on it every day and usually in in the early morning.
“I really think that the moment when the grenadier guards went down the Champs Elysees and saluted him, and were in liberated Paris after five years of misery. I really think that was the most glorious moment of my life.”
“I was anti Golist from the moment the the man first spoke over the B B C, on the eighteenth of june, nineteen forty. I saw we were in for trouble with him. I saw that he was going to use Britain as the springboard for his own ambition.”
“I always like to go over the scenes of a book. I remember once a reporter was very angry with me for writing about what I'd seen in Lima de Peru. He said it was impossible for anybody to have been in in Peru. But in fact I'd been there twice, writing my thousand words of description every morning.”