Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A journalist and publisher best known for editing The Sunday Times, where he ran campaigns on thalidomide and the Crossman Diaries.
On the island
Eight records
Mache dich, mein Herze, rein (from St Matthew Passion, BWV 244)
Cornelius Hauptmann, English Baroque Soloists, John Eliot Gardiner
Bach St. Matthew Passion, apart from being very moving music, has special connections for me with the finest cathedral. Dramatic and exciting architectural site in the world to me is Durham Cathedral, as seen from the railway station arriving.
Record number two is memory of my mother and father. It's uh They Didn't Believe Me with Ambrose and his Orchestra. My father uh used to sing uh Al Jolson songs.
Mir ist so wunderbar (from Fidelio)
when I was on the Ashton Underline Reporter as a young journalist, Eric Marsden, came invalided out of the fleet air arm. and appreciated Beethoven and opened my eyes to Beethoven.
Pete Seeger, Jack Elliott, and Ed McCurdy
When I went to America in nineteen fifty six and Enid, my first wife, came, we went West and I wanted to be a cowboy and I wanted to be live with the Indians, and I did, because I wanted to write a book. about the myth of America and the reality of the West
Dido's Lament (from Dido and Aeneas)
Jessye Norman, English Chamber Orchestra, Raymond Leppard
I just chose it for its beauty rather than for any particular memories.
Clarinet Quintet in A major, K. 581: II. Larghetto
George Pieterson, Arthur Grumiaux, Koji Toyoda, Max Lesueur, János Scholz
has a particular memory for me because uh Nick Tomlin, who was one of the most brilliant reporters on the Sunday Times, was practising the clarinet when he'd taken leave of absence from the Sunday Times when the Yom Kippur War broke out. And me and my colleagues decided that the person who should go and report for us was Nick. And he went and he got killed.
Vienna State Opera Chorus, Vienna Philharmonic, Sir Georg Solti
I'm particularly excited by this p recording. The Penguin books are bringing out discs in which writers, not musicologists, say what the music means to them. And Paul Johnson's written a very nice essay about Wagner, a controversial figure.
Concerto for Two Trumpets and Strings in C major, RV 537
Wynton Marsalis, English Chamber Orchestra, Raymond Leppard
When I was president of Random House, I restarted a modern library, and I included in it The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, a great book about growing up as a black man. And I gave a dinner for Ellison shortly before he died, and then Winton came along and played this.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:49When did you decide you wanted to be a journalist and how early on was that?
Oh, one of the big journeys I think must have been very early when I discovered that the English compositions I did at St. Mary's Road Central School were received with somewhat more tolerance than my efforts in physics and chemistry and so on. So that may have been a thought, hello, perhaps I can do this when I can't make the stink bombs in the lab like everybody else.
Presenter asks
11:11Did [Rupert] Murdoch know what was going on in your life [when your father died]?
Oh yes, yes, yes. … Well, he wrote me a very nice letter when my father died saying … I know what it's like to lose a father. Take any time you like and go to the funeral and so on. So I got prepared for the funeral. And when I got prepared for the funeral he asked me to resign. That was the moment he chose.
Presenter asks
23:39How long before [Rupert Murdoch] started to try and influence what you were putting in the paper?
Oh, not for the first six months at all. And I have to say this about him, and let me make it clear, that though I think that losing me was a loss to freedom of the press, I think he more than compensated for that by fighting the print unions and winning.
The keepsakes
The book
Shelby Foote
I would lay out the battlefields on the sands with pine cones and needles and leaves, and arrange Robert E. Lee forces at Gettysburg and the charge of pickets up the across the great vast expanse where they get murdered by the Unionists.
Presenter asks
25:06Do you think that Tony Blair is in danger of doing the same [behaving as Rupert Murdoch's poodle]?
I think Tony Blair's a man of enormous integrity and I don't think there's any danger of that myself. Uh I haven't seen any evidence of it and … I hear what you say, Sue, but I think Labour would have won the election without the Sun, and I think Labour can win the next election without the Sun or without the Times or without News of the World.
Presenter asks
28:18How easy was [moving to America] for you, because you're not sort of naturally glamorous, as it were?
The point of it is the Americans are enormously welcoming. I arrived and after teaching at the university, Duke University, I was then invited by Mort Zuckerman to uh run a publishing house and then to take over a news magazine. And before you know where you are, you're part of the life there.
“My greatest strength, he says, is reckless insensitivity to the possibility of failure.”
“The most crucial feature in journalism is what freedom does the editor have and what responsibilities for good management and investment does ownership have.”
“Until that period, nobody really realised just how half free, as I call it, the British press was and to me to some extent still is in terms of the legal restraints it faces by comparison with the United States.”
“If there's freedom and it's not used properly, is it not a betrayal of the public trust?”