Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Historian and biographer best known for his work on Winston Churchill.
On the island
Eight records
Robert Ashley with Jack Payne and his Band
Well, the first record is actually the first song I can remember when I went as a boy of three and a half to Canada during the war.
The only song I was ever put on the stage to sing.
M'apparì tutt'amorFavourite
A seventy eight, which I played and played until it simply scratched itself away. But it was, I think, the first record that uh I ever owned and ever sort of fell in love with.
The Slow Movement of Winter (from The Four Seasons)
Itzhak Perlman and the London Philharmonic Orchestra
That is a piece of music which I first heard when I was at university... one of the most beautiful and comforting pieces of music I know, and which I always listen to when I'm feeling in need of comfort.
The Battle Hymn of the Republic
Robert Shaw Chorale and the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra
I thought one of Churchill's own favourites, one which was actually a song which was sung at his funeral. And a song which often brought great tears to his eyes.
Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus
I was so staggered to hear this little piece of, as it were, pop music from my Oxford home suddenly blaring out in the middle of remote Silesia. that I thought I'd choose it to remind myself of my son himself and his first choice.
And the song which I've uh chosen actually relates to the town in the remote east of Poland. from which some of my wife's grandparents came.
So I've tried to choose a song which has always moved me. which in a way links the two cities, and links perhaps the aspirations of the two peoples.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:36How much of an interest in music do you have? Is it important?
I'm totally unmusical. At the same time, I always enjoy listening to music, and strangely enough, I find I can write better if there's some musical background.
Presenter asks
5:36When you were a child, were there a lot of books about the house?
My father was an avid reader, and always encouraged me to read books. We lived only in a very small flat, and I remember the books sort of somehow propping up tables and at the side of beds and squeezed in behind doors
Presenter asks
8:27What subject did you choose for your thesis?
My thesis, which was actually never written, took many different forms. First of all, I was going to do a great work on a Russian revolutionary figure... And I then turned to Indian history and unfortunately put a small joke in my thesis. And. My supervisor said we don't really approve of jokes in this university and theses, so in despair I gave it up
Presenter asks
The keepsakes
The book
The Companion Volumes of the Churchill Biography
Martin Gilbert
they will remind me for as long as I last of all the marvellous people I've met... and above all my wife's incredible contribution to this task.
The luxury
what I will take is a two-sided picture frame, and on one side I will have the latest drawing my son has done of me, 'Daddy with Monkeys'.
How did you get your introduction to [Randolph Churchill]?
I owe it entirely to Lady Diana Cooper, whom I had gone to see in connection with some of my rather more prosaic historical work, and she urged me to go and see Randolph Churchill in his own right... And he received her letters, sent me telegrams. I finally turned up and... was drawn into the web.
Presenter asks
18:45How long did you think it was going to take to complete [the Churchill biography]?
Originally I thought it would be possible to finish it within well within a decade. Ten years... But unfortunately Harold Wilson who was Prime Minister at the time decided to create a thing called the Thirty Year Rule, to throw open the archives... So I, in common with all historians, found ourselves with a great Aladdin's cave of material.
“The evening became. A day and the day became. A temporary job for Three months, and the temporary job became five years of Apprenticeship for the Churchill Biography.”
“I always felt I had to see the documents myself and be totally absorbed and of course do all the writing. And the larger the team, the more you would distance yourself really from the original material.”
“I am a slave for chronology. I believe that if I can only put everything in its correct day by day order, and within the day, Morning Noon and afternoon order. then I will begin to understand what made him tick and what made the events tick.”