Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A historian of war, author of twenty books including 'The Face of Battle' and 'A History of Warfare', recreating the soldier's experience despite never seeing b
On the island
Eight records
Kinderszenen, Op. 15: No. 1, Von fremden Ländern und Menschen
my wife plays it on the piano, and the piano is under my study, and sometimes when I'm working in the late afternoon, I hear scenes from childhood floating up.
The Band of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst
it's always played at Sovereigns Parade, when the cadets are commissioned. And I suppose I've been to... Fifty, sixty sovereigns' parades in my life. It's very evocative indeed.
An die Musik, D. 547Favourite
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore
when I was in my early teens The piano background was the introduction to a programme on the BBC called Music Magazine, which I thought was the most sophisticated programme Uh in the whole of broadcasting
these were the records that my sister and I found in the gramophone cabinet at home when we started to wonder what was in the gramophone cabinet, and of course they were the records my parents had danced to in the thirties when they were young.
I chose it partly because it's one of the great prayers of the church, but m more because our two sons went to Downside.
Clarinet Concerto in A major, K. 622: II. Adagio
Jack Brymer, Academy of St Martin in the Fields and Sir Neville Marriner
my younger daughter Who's an actress? plays the clarinet. Uh she certainly doesn't play it as well as it's played here, but she does play the clarinet and it will remind me of her.
Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85: III. Adagio
Jacqueline du Pré, London Symphony Orchestra and Sir John Barbirolli
my elder daughter, who is a musician, who read music at Oxford, plays the cello, and this will remind me of her.
The Hebrides, Op. 26 (Fingal's Cave)
Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Sir Alexander Gibson
every year we all go the home the family, four children and our five grandchildren, and and my wife and I go to the same house. in West Argyllshire, in a little Peninsula called Knappdale, and from Knappdale we look out of the Hebrides.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:10Have you, despite its horrors, sometimes wished that you had seen action?
When I was younger, perhaps, and more foolish. Um as I get older I th I think it becomes more and more unthinkable and unbearable even in imagination.
Presenter asks
3:29How great a blow was it to you [to be declared permanently unfit for military service]?
Not at all. I expected it. I knew that I wasn't going to. Be past.
Presenter asks
9:48Would I be right in thinking that your father's experience of war marked you also?
Well, my father had been in the First World War, marked me only in the sense that uh he told me stories about it, but I now realise very carefully censored ones. He'd been a gunner, he'd been on the Western Front uh from nineteen seventeen to eighteen. He was gassed in the March offensive of nineteen eighteen, which I think was a good thing because it kept him in hospital for a very nasty period of of the spring of nineteen eighteen. But, you know, I suppose like Dr Johnson says about men, he felt better about himself for having been a soldier, and I sensed that.
The keepsakes
The luxury
well, I used to speak French very well and I've got rusty and I thought, um could I have a sort of French-speaking man robot?
Presenter asks
17:00Is [your time in the sanatorium] one of the reasons, perhaps, that you've chosen to write your history from the perspective of the soldier, from the ordinary man?
I think it's I think it has a great deal to do with it, because most people don't have the chance to live inside another class, whether whether it's an upwards or downwards movement. But um illness gives you no choice. I mean that that's what happens. And of course you d if you live inside another class you discover that um class isn't a very important characteristic, that character and personality are so much more important. … That's why I I I think you're right. I think that's why I've always been much more interested in the individual in warfare than in and particularly the the ordinary soldier in warfare than commanders and officers.
Presenter asks
18:32How are [soldiers] different and why?
Well, I think regular soldiers and that's what Santos produces have taken an odd decision. Uh they've they've mortgaged their lives. They've promised their lives ahead of time, as Americans would say, because um the oath they take and the uh the code of honor they follow requires them to give up their lives if if that's what duty says.
“I'm very lucky to be slightly disabled. I'm more disabled now than I used to be, and I think it's opportunity obvious that I couldn't have been a soldier,'cause I limp.”
“medieval man was altogether more bloodthirsty and realistic about uh life and death and the taking of life than uh than anybody in the Western world today.”
“What stands between the innocent and bestiality are precisely these highly motivated, civilized soldiers from from the Western armies.”