Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Historian known for her bestselling account of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and first woman to win the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction.
On the island
Eight records
Well, the first piece is a Welsh ballad, Mivanwi, and it's partly because my mother was Welsh. She had a wonderful voice and she adored Welsh music... and my father, who was Scots and who, of course, loved the bagpipes, did also love Welsh music, and this was his favourite Welsh song as well as one of my mother's.
Mood IndigoFavourite
It's Duke Ellington and it's Mood Indigo, which is so wonderful. And I've always had the greatest admiration for him... My parents were both medical students at the University of Toronto in the 1940s during the war. And they danced to this at the medical students' graduation with Duke Ellington's band.
Elena Kotrebach and Sheryl Milnes
This is that famous duet from the Traviata where the father of Violetta's lover comes to her and says, look, for the sake of my son, you have to leave him... And it is beautiful. And she does renounce her lover. And you can see that the Baron is beginning to understand who she is and what sort of woman she is. And it's just, I find it incredibly moving.
It's Canadian. That's why I've chosen it... This is a song in French about some of those exiles sung by an English Canadian folk singer... And it says something to me about all those Canadians who are either forced to leave or do leave. And you always miss Canada, and you miss the space, and you miss the country. And every time I hear it, I think about Canada.
Horn Concerto No. 2 in E-flat major, K. 417 - Rondo
Dennis Brain, Philharmonia Orchestra
I remember one night being incredibly homesick... I had a little short wave radio and suddenly I heard this Mozart horn concerto on my little radio. Made me feel incredibly homesick.
Bob Dylan, Blowing in the Wind. Well, again, that's part of my youth. And it was the 60s. And Vietnam was something that was a big cause... And this was a song that just wove its way, as a lot of Bob Dylan's music did through the 60s. And it seemed to it, wasn't just about Vietnam, it was about the turmoil, the upheaval, the civil rights movements, the whole sort of challenge to what had been an accepted structure.
This is from a composer I came to late in life, Wagner. I didn't get Wagner when I was younger. I found it heavy... But as I began to listen to Wagner... I began to get it, I think. And I finally went to a ring cycle, and I found the music just kept going on and on through my head. And so this is the overture from the Meistersinger, which is one of the first Wagner operas I really came to love.
Sophie Koch, Renée Fleming, Diana Damrau, Munich Philharmonic
It's from The Rosen Cavalier, which is another of my favorite operas, but it's from the last act when the Marshalline recognizes that Octavian is in love with a much younger woman and she's recognizing her age. And so it's about aging. And since I'm now seventy five, aging is something I think about... And it's a very moving piece, I think. And it's sort of when the Rose and Cavalier stops being a comic opera and it becomes something rather sadder. Anyway, it's elegiac and it is, I think, a wonderful piece of music.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:41Your book Peacemakers was rejected by a number of publishers. Why did they get it so wrong, and what was it about the book that connected with people?
I think why publishers perhaps got it wrong is it was at the end of the Cold War and everyone was looking ahead. And the Paris Peace Conference seemed so far in the past and why worry about it. But as the troubles began, after the Cold War ended, you know, we all thought there was going to be this lovely moment of peace, and then suddenly Yugoslavia fell to pieces. You got troubles in the Middle East, trouble in Afghanistan, and people began to ask, how did this all start? And why are these places having these conflicts? And you have to go back to understand them. To understand the Middle East conflicts, you have to go back. And so I think my book came at a time when people were beginning to ask those questions. And just to check, how many copies has it sold now?
Presenter asks
2:41Why did the publishers get it so wrong?
I think why publishers perhaps got it wrong is it was at the end of the Cold War and everyone was looking ahead. And the Paris Peace Conference seemed so far in the past and why worry about it. But as the troubles began, after the Cold War ended, you know, we all thought there was going to be this lovely moment of peace, and then suddenly Yugoslavia fell to pieces. You got troubles in the Middle East, trouble in Afghanistan, and people began to ask, how did this all start? And why are these places having these conflicts? And you have to go back to understand them. To understand the Middle East conflicts, you have to go back. And so I think my book came at a time when people were beginning to ask those questions.
The keepsakes
The book
Marcel Proust
it may be slightly cheating, is Proust, à la la Rochesse du Temp Perdieu. And I would like to take it in French, because my French is rusty, and it would force me to read in French, and it would keep me going for quite a while.
The luxury
a device that teaches me to sing
what I would like is something, possibly a device that will teach me to sing... so that I can practice singing... something that would play a few notes and then I would sing back to the thing and it would play it back to me, I couldn't do anything else with it. It would just be for learning to sing.
“I come from a small country, not small geographically, but small in terms of power and population. And I never felt when I was writing about great events like the First World War that I had to defend my country or blame my country.”
“we were a bit like, you know, Europe before the First World War, shifting alliances.”
“I remember the first time I was reading something before the First World War and there were sort of comments scribbled on the side and then the initials WC and I thought who's W. And I thought Winston Churchill, you know, and you thought he just scribbled something hastily on this, and that is exciting.”
“Hitler was a vegetarian and nice to dogs, it didn't change my view of him.”