Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Writer and publisher, co-founder of a publishing house, former Tory MP, best known for the book 'Portrait of a Marriage' about his parents.
On the island
Eight records
Eleventh Army Officers' Training School of Hamburg
Traditional; popularised during WWII
Reading from Pride and Prejudice
Reading from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, abridged by Elizabeth Bradbury
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:01Do you regret writing Portrait of a Marriage?
No, it was a great problem of whether to publish my mother's autobiography or not, which she wrote when she was only late twenties about this dramatic affair when she eloped with another woman called Vali Tefusis. And I showed the her manuscript, which I found after her death, to one or two of her friends and my brother. And the general opinion was, not unanimous, that this was something which was so excellent as a bit of an autobiography, so interesting, so vivid, that it should be published. … I had to wait obviously until after my father had died and Violet and Trefusius had died. And it was during that time, those ten years, that I could ponder the rightness or the wrongness of exposing my mother to what some people call matricide. I don't think so at all. I think it actually enhanced her reputation.
Presenter asks
2:35How can you be sure that your parents would have wanted their story told?
I think my mother wanted it told. … I have more doubts about my father, because in a sort of way he was the more reticent about that sort of subject than she was. … It was of him that I was thinking more than of her.
Presenter asks
3:26How did it affect you to discover in middle age, from her own hand, the deep passion your mother had felt for another woman?
The keepsakes
Well, as you say, I had known vaguely about the story. She'd never mentioned it. My father had never mentioned it. We never discussed sex in our family. It was that sort of family. And so it didn't come as a great shock to me. I was fascinated by her account of it, every detail supported, of course, by the letters which she had kept, the diaries which she had kept.
Presenter asks
8:48What are your memories of Virginia Woolf?
I adored her. She was like a favourite aunt. And whenever my mother said Virginia's coming to lunch or coming to stay, I was delighted, because I knew that there would come a moment when she would say, Vita, go away. Can't you see I'm talking to Ben and Nigel? … And then she would ask us about our simple lies, our school lies. She'd say, what's the Frenchmistress like? … She was really teaching us to observe.
Presenter asks
15:17You were obeying orders, but do you retain an awful guilt about the forcible repatriation of Yugoslavs?
I do, but less so than if I had made no protest at the time. … in retrospect, nothing pleases me more than I did protest in writing at the time.
Presenter asks
31:08You wrote that your reputation is that of a grasshopper. Is that how you think of yourself?
A bit of a dilettante. Oh dear. Yes, it is true. … I don't think I was a very good soldier, a very good publisher, even a very good politician. If I'd stuck to one of them. To writing, do you think? Well, perhaps to writing. I would have missed a very great deal of experience and pleasure that I've had from the other occupations.
“I think we shall be very happy here.”
“I went there, I think, twice in thirty two years. It was her sanctum.”
“It was impregnated with her personality.”
“I can say quite honestly, it's the thing I'm most proud of having done in all my life.”
“A bit of a dilettante. Oh dear. Yes, it is true.”