Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A writer and master of grand biography, astute fiction, and sweeping history, known for biographies of literary giants like Dickens and Shakespeare.
On the island
Eight records
my grandfather had a collection of Seventy-Eights … I used to dance around to them
Grosse Fuge in B-flat major, Op. 133
first piece of classical music that I ever purchased
one of the great exemplars of sacred music
Serenade for Strings in E major, Op. 22
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra
for the simple reason that I like it
I identified with Peter having the same name … I thought of this motif as somehow my signature tune
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:12Is it simply that you don't like talking about yourself that's the problem?
I'm not very keen on talking about myself. I must say it's a subject which I approach with trepidation. I'd much rather talk about my work rather than about my life, because I don't really think my life holds that much interest for anyone apart from myself.
Presenter asks
8:23What do you remember about that period [in Crawley]?
Yes, she did. She took me on tours of central London, or the city, as we should most properly call it and I think my grandmother communicated to me her love for London, and I suppose thereby planted the seeds for my love.
Presenter asks
9:16What about the idea you've written about a lot: that the deep, rich, complex and often violent past of London somehow lives on? Can you explain a bit more of that thought?
Yes, well, one example is when the editor of the big issue wrote to me saying that he had cited his magazine in Clerkenwell, although he had no knowledge of its radical roots. The area seems to be a magnet to some kinds of London activity. So the spirit of the place can live on in most extraordinary ways. And what I try to do in many of the books I've written is to underline the lines of light which connect the past and the present in a sort of lover's embrace, that the past is always present.
The keepsakes
The book
Thomas à Kempis
It was a book that powerfully influenced me when I was a boy, and I'd like the chance to reread it.
The luxury
Presenter asks
13:52Your father wasn't around, you didn't miss that either?
No, I didn't. He vanished from my life when I was a baby, so it was not as if I had seen him or known him at all.
Presenter asks
16:06Do you believe in ghosts?
I don't believe in them, but I'm frightened of them.
Presenter asks
30:36How did you and Brian cope and react to that diagnosis [of AIDS]?
Well, we coped as well as we could. He was alive for another five years, and I was more or less his sole companion. … Well life became simpler. It reduced its scope to, you know, one or two necessary things. He never lost his cheerfulness in fact, he was singing in the bath the day before he died.
“The people whom I've chosen for the biographical speculations tend to be what I would call cockney visionaries … They've instituted a tradition to which I myself aspire.”
“London has been my constant companion all my life. It's been the source of whatever inspiration I possess, and it's been the landscape of whatever imagination I have for as long as I have lived.”
“I don't want to adopt the [religion] of other people … I would call it a state of pious awareness that London is a being which has its own laws of growth and change.”
“I've never been happier than when I've been celibate. Even when I was a boy wanting to be a Cistercian monk, I had the same instincts as I do now, it suits my character.”
“Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death. So that final book is the one which gives me the sense of achievement, not the various chapters as such.”