Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Philosopher and educator who chaired the inquiry into the ethical questions surrounding test tube babies.
On the island
Eight records
played by the Albion Quartet with my son, my eldest son, playing in it, which is why I've chosen this recording. And it is an enormous pleasure in my life to have a professional musician among my children.
Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras (from Ein deutsches Requiem)
Chorus of the Wiener Staatsoper, Vienna Philharmonic
that I absolutely love and I think … This is where I would say I was sentimental. I need to have reminders of um mortality around me. And I have a particular passion for Brahm, so this brings the two together.
the first of their songs that I ever heard, which is By By Love. … there was something about both the lyrics and the wit of the Everley Brothers that really got to me. I loved it.
Concerto grosso No. 2 in B flat major
And this I love, have always loved Handel. … and especially the harpsichord playing of Trevor Pinnock.
My Beloved SpakeFavourite
Choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford; The English Concert; Simon Preston (organ)
Until now I've always lived in a cathedral tower in either Winchester or Oxford and I I think the one thing I really miss about leaving Oxford is leaving the cathedral, which I love.
Robert Tear (tenor), Neil Saunders (horn), Lamar Crowson (piano)
Thinking of the desert island. I think I would almost have to have some Schubert there. … Well, I think the combination of tenor and horn is absolutely amazing.
Christ lag in Todesbanden (Cantata No. 1)
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Munich Bach Choir and Orchestra
I couldn't have a list of eight records that didn't have Bach and it would have been very easy to have eight records by Bach, who in a way I think was my first love as a composer. … with Dietrich Fischer Diskow whom again I admire to distraction.
Trio Sonata No. 3 in B flat major (second movement)
Heinz Holliger (oboe), Maurice Bourgue (oboe), Sashko Gavrilov (violin), Klaus Thunemann (bassoon)
I heard it one day when I was driving up, I think, to a meeting of the IBA. And it practically took my car off the road. I'd never heard a sound quite so dramatically lovely as this.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:00Would you describe yourself as a blue stocking?
Yeah. … I certainly was a blue stocking, if that means someone who was interested very much interested in academic work when I was an undergraduate. But I suppose no, not wholly. I mean, I spent an awful lot of my childhood listening to Radio Luxembourg and, um, riding horses. So I don't think that's blue stocking work really.
Presenter asks
4:24How did you become such a natural for these [public committees]?
Being a philosopher is a great help. … a philosophy chairman is is quite useful. They start ignorant. But they are quite quick to learn. … you are quite accustomed to saying, I don't understand, you better go back and tell me. Which is useful in a chairman. … the other thing I think is that perhaps temperamentally, I don't know, I'm capable of not getting too much involved in um the actual things that make people upset on the report. So other people get very frantic and I can put it all away.
Presenter asks
9:08When you went to school, did that [happy home] make you a rather private person?
I think that's absolutely right. I greatly enjoyed school, greatly enjoyed it, and I loved all the dramas … But I always felt … not exactly superior, but but different from most other people, and reverted to a completely separate life in the holidays.
The keepsakes
The book
Anthony Trollope
I think I shall be thinking about England rather obsessively, so I've got to have a book that tells me about England, and I've got to have a novel, because I do love novel reading. So I think I'll have a novel by Trollope, and probably the best of all his novels is um The Last Chronicle of Barset.
The luxury
I have always kept a diary, and I think on the desert island this diary will become very important, even if nobody ever sees it.
Presenter asks
13:34How did you then sort out having a professional academic life with being married and subsequently producing children? Because it was not particularly encouraged at the time that you should do both, was it?
No, it certainly wasn't encouraged, but um I never really, seriously thought of giving up, though occasionally when things got a bit rough and the children it all seemed too much and we couldn't keep a nanny and whatnot, I said I'd give up. … more by good luck than judgment, I think all of my children except one were born in the long vacation … One of them was um born on the first day of the Hillary term and I took four weeks off then. But that was all. I didn't have to have any more time off.
Presenter asks
22:21You concluded in that [Warnock] report that human embryos should not be experimented on after fourteen days, but that still hasn't become law, has it? … do you think [creating hybrids] could happen?
No, no, it hasn't, though a law of some kind, I think, is promised before the next general election. … I don't think that hybrids, uh for example, could at the moment, at any rate, happen, and I think that it would be very reassuring if there were a law in place that criminalised certain activities like cloning, like cross-fertilization and so on, which people really do fear very much. I'm really quite anxious now that what we as a committee recommended most strongly, which was that there should be a central ethical committee to look at all these questions, including gene therapy and all the things that have grown up since actually since 1984 when we published our report. I think that central committee ought now to be established.
Presenter asks
29:45Why do men outperform women at university?
I think they are bolder. I think they are less concerned about whether they get things right. They are more anxious to chance their arm. Of course, I mean, there are very brilliant women at university, but they tend to be a little bit more cautious, I think, and end up in the two one class rather than the first, where men might be a little less cautious and tip themselves over into the first class.
“I sat with my head down, slogging through my work, not talking to anybody much.”
“It was called Talk Talking. And every time we went for a walk, we went on with this long continuing saga. And we went on doing that, I have shame to say, until we were undergraduates.”
“Dear Mary, may I call you Miss Wilson? … that was one of the worst snubs I've ever had, and that was my first encounter with him.”
“I now know what it's like for men to be married. It is absolutely blissful. To come in and the house is gleaming clean and warm and everything is in working order and you don't fear the ceiling will have fallen down in the frost.”
“I simply couldn't [go into politics], because I dislike the compulsory deceit, the lack of candor that goes with politics. … I'm very bad at people publicly criticising me and rubbishing what I say, so I'd have nothing going for me as a politician at all.”