Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Publisher and author who signed top literary authors, wrote thrillers, produced the BBC documentary The Story of English, and wrote the stroke memoir My Year Of
On the island
Eight records
Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op. 31: Elegy
Peter Pears, Dennis Brain, Boyd Neel String Orchestra, conducted by Benjamin Britten
I'm a writer who wants to pay tribute to an English master. When I was at Sherbourne School, I was taught English by Lionel Bruce ... and he played Britain's Serenade for Tenor Horn and Strings to us, and it contains a rendering of Blake's The Sick Rose.
Max C. Freedman and James E. Myers
I can remember lying in bed upstairs in our house in Cambridge, listening to this music floating up from down below. And it seems to me to express the energy of the fifties and the and the and the sense of life returning to normal thus that's after the after the great deprivations of the war.
Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor, Op. 31, No. 2, 'The Tempest'
I also, like a lot of boys of my background, was made to learn the piano. And the height of my piano learning experience was I mastered the first movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. I'm not going to choose that, because that'd be too corny. But I've come to love Beethoven's piano music ... and so I want to choose another piano sonata, which is number seventeen.
André Previn and the London Symphony Orchestra
I went to America at the age of twenty one or thereabouts ... and suddenly I'm in this extraordinary country, and I sort of fell in love with it overnight. ... And for me, um the composer who expresses that love affair is Gershwin.
I am of that kind of in-between generation. But nonetheless there's only one music for from that time, the greatest songwriter ever, Bob Dylan.
When we were when Sarah and I were, as it were, courting ... she was living in America, in New York ... and we b we would spend whole days watching films. And one of the films that we saw was a marvellous film which we both loved, Clueless ... And there's a song in in that which whenever I hear it brings back both that time, it brings back Sarah, it brings back America and it brings back the beginnings of our relationship.
Fear No More the Heat o' the Sun (from Cymbeline)
In the course of my time at Favours I met many great men, but there was nobody greater in my mind than Ted Hughes, who has real majesty, real grandeur, and also tremendous humanity. When I was ill, he and his wife Carol came to visit me, and I thought this was a a gesture of such supreme generosity.
Cello Suite No. 3 in C major, BWV 1009: I. PréludeFavourite
Well the last record is music which I think is both tremendously profound and also intensely erotic, and it's barks shallow suites.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:08What does that mean, Robert, that you're a nicer person than you used to be [since your stroke]?
I think I'm more tolerant. Um I hope so. I think I was unaware, really, of disadvantage before, certainly in f in physical terms. And I think that m I was living life at such a pace that I was missing out on all kinds of nuances. And I think that the effect of being very seriously ill ... Tuned me into the world of pain.
Presenter asks
1:51Were you really as dismissive and arrogant as they said you were before [your stroke]?
I think that's to do with the fact that I got this job at Faber and Faber at a very young age. I was twenty-five and did it for twenty years or thereabouts. And I came into a company which had rather lost its way, frankly. And it needed to have leadership and clarity. And leadership and clarity really means being rather arrogant about saying what's right and what's wrong, what's good and bad, and the rest of it. And one had to be dismissive, because it seemed to me that the most important decisions that you made were probably the ones where you said no rather than said yes.
Presenter asks
7:17Describe the race [of the English upper middle class handicap] to me. What's the course?
The keepsakes
The book
Jerome K. Jerome
I want a funny book, so I would take three men in a boat.
The luxury
I would want to take some Hypericum, some Saint John's wart, cause I think I might get a little bit depressed on there, and I would want to keep myself my spirits up, and Hypericum does that, keeps you cheery.
It's a pretty short course. ... With a lot of hurdles. I was born my my father was an academic. ... My mother was the daughter of the headmaster of Rugby School. So I was born into the upper middle class educated establishment essentially. And children in the fifties and children of that sort were sent to prep school, to public school, and ultimately to university. And so there were three big fences to close. The the common entrance fence, the public school scholarship fence, and finally the Oxbridge entrance fence. And everything was geared to that, really.
Presenter asks
8:57How much was that pressure [to clear the hurdles] coming from without, or was it from within you?
I think it came from within. I think I'm quite driven, and I want you know, I'm I'm quite a perfectionist, and I want to and I want to win. ... I think for a long time I wanted to please my m please my parents, my father particularly, and to live up to his very high standards. I think now that that's that's faded somewhat, but I think it was a very powerful impulse all through my early years.
Presenter asks
23:30What was the first you knew about not functioning properly [at the onset of your stroke]?
Well, I have gone out to dinner um with a very old friend from America. ... And we had dinner and as the meal came to an end and we s got up to go, I was aware that my legs felt very heavy, as though they were kind of encased in lead, or I was walking through treacle. And I thought no more of it and went home. And I was alone in the house, and um I woke up the following morning and I was completely paralysed, couldn't move.
Presenter asks
25:03How did you raise the alarm?
So then, as I'm lying in bed I can hardly move. ... I rolled to the edge of the bed to try and get to the telephone. I fell out of bed onto the floor. ... I knew there was a phone on the floor downstairs, so I thought, well I I'll go down and I'll go I'll go down the stairs to the phone. So I crawl under the bed this takes hours and hours and hours crawl under the bed and then down the s down the down the stairs to the mezzanine landing, down the stairs again. And by the end of that Saturday afternoon, at about six o'clock, six thirty, I'd got myself downstairs to the phone. ... And interestingly I never thought of calling nine nine nine, I called my mother.
“I think that the effect of being very seriously ill ... Tuned me into the world of pain.”
“it made me aware of the very thin line between ... being active and alert and alive, and really being ... An incontinent vegetable, which is what what I rarely was.”
“I think I've always led a kind of double life. I was working as a publisher and I was writing books at the same time”
“I think I'll always look on the world through the eyes of somebody who nearly died. And I think I'm very conscious of mortality and and and and and um decay”