Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Philanthropist and publisher, founder of one of the UK's largest philanthropic foundations and owner of the literary magazine Granta.
On the island
Eight records
and I love it because I love her voice. There's so much strength and truth and passion in it.
My parents loved Tom Lehrer, so I listened to this a lot when I was a child.
which I think perfectly to me sums up what it is to be depressive and to… you try to make it life, you try to make relationships and it just says something about how hard that is.
Étude in C major, Op. 10 No. 1Favourite
When I first met Eric, Eric Abraham, my husband, we used to sit in his car and we used to listen to this and I just remember sitting in the car and the rain drumming on the roof and listening to this very loudly.
it's so beautiful and so haunting.
I've always associated this song with Eva… And what happened to her?… It's very sad to me.
Eric and I sang at our wedding… And so when I hitch my voice to his voice, I can kind of stay in harmony. And it reminds me of our wedding and how funny it was.
It's my kind of aspirational piece, if you like, because it's so filled with gentleness and the sense of harmony and order… I find it very soothing and I find it very beautiful.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:57How adept are you at sniffing out when people are more interested in what you have than who you are?
In a certain sense it's something that I take absolutely for granted as a… it's an existential condition. I take it for granted that to some degree the money adds a bit of glamour, even if people don't want anything…
Presenter asks
5:04What was life like growing up? Paint me a little picture.
We lived in the townhouse in [Lund] by the cathedral… in the town of Lund, in southern Sweden… And Lund is a bit like Cambridge in Sweden… we were at state schools, yeah.
Presenter asks
10:05You signed up to Amnesty International when you were just fifteen. What was the motivation for that?
Well, I started out as being very protective of animals… And then I became interested in human rights… I'd always grown up with stories about the Holocaust… My grandfather and his brother had been very involved in the Welcome Committee for the Danish Jews Coming to Sweden.
The keepsakes
The book
Jane Austen
I'm a great believer in re-reading and re-read Jane Austen on kind of rotation. And my favourite Jane Austen is Mansfield Park.
Presenter asks
11:26You had an episode of depression when you were seventeen. Did you understand it as depression at the time?
I didn't understand what was happening to me. I was so disassociated and… feeling very depressed, but also I was very paralyzed.
Presenter asks
18:53Tell me about that later episode of depression in your twenties. What were the circumstances?
My brother had just come out of one of his many rehabs… and he immediately relapsed again… He became increasingly difficult to live with… after the summer… he suddenly was gone. And I had no idea where he was… Through that autumn I was quite… mildly depressed… then in February… my brother was there. He'd come back… she took him in and he went to another rehab… And when that happened, I went into a much deeper depression… I think it's quite common, you know, once you know that somebody is safe, you can kind of let go a bit.
Presenter asks
21:03What help was available to you [when your brother was struggling with addiction]?
I ended up going myself as a family member to that same rehab… I cut my arms and then they found me bad and… Just being with other people was very healing for me.
“We live in a profoundly unfair society. Wealth is increasing for the wealthy, and debt is increasing for those in debt. Once you know that, it seems to me you can't not try to do something for the common good with that money.”
“He is very eccentric. He is very inventive. He is a kind of true anarchist.”
“I didn't understand what was happening to me. I was so disassociated and, you know, not only feeling very depressed, but also I was very paralyzed.”
“when you're funding human rights, you're really dealing with the whole world, and it's a very big landscape. And when you're dealing with publishing, you know, you're thinking about how will this book sell… there is a kind of madness in the big world of philanthropy… the sense of you have all this money, so you can do anything, you can fix anything. The reality is you can do very little.”