Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A historian who brought history to a wider audience as author and presenter of the BBC series A History of Britain.
On the island
Eight records
First piece of music is Cole Porter, You're the Top, and he makes the most extraordinary connections. ... But my dad was the first music I heard was show tunes. Our house was full of show tunes, and my parents used to sing.
Violin Sonata No. 3 in E Major, BWV 1006: I. Preludio
Number two is really Sharma discovers classical music. We had I had a wonderful English teacher whose idea of a really great English lesson was to play Bach a lot of Poch and to avoid metaphysical poetry. I was knocked out by it
You Can't Always Get What You Want
This is to bring back on the desert island sixties. I had a great time in the sixties and when you have teenage children, as I do, you keep apologising for the sixties ... I want to hear the Rolling Stones.
Oh dear, it's um I've screwed up my life music from Eugene Onyegan. And this song is Lenski's aria before he goes off and completes the miserable chaos and calamity of his life. It's awful and it's wonderful.
It is a perfectly conceived and executed poem. The writers I most envy are poets. Poets are have this extraordinary imaginative precision and, even as my most loyal readers will know, conciseness, succinctness.
This is punk rock. ... And the Ramones are just naughty boys from Queens. And the song is I Wanna Be Sedated, which they probably put out on my tombstone when I die.
Symphony No. 9 in C Major, D. 944 "The Great": IV. Allegro vivaceFavourite
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Sir Georg Solti
Number seven is the life force music. ... It's ultimate cheer-up music by a man who had so much sadness in his life. If I'm ever f in danger of feeling sorry for myself, some critic has said something particularly poisonous, the way to stop whining is to put this on.
String Quartet No. 14 in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 131: I. Adagio ma non troppo e molto espressivo
Despite all this sort of shouting at cameras, there is an inward shama. And it's Beethoven, one of the Beethoven late-string quartets, 131, and the beautiful first movement.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:30Is it the communication of history that drives you as much as the history itself?
Well I do love the writing, and actually I do think in some of the models I revere, going all the way back to Herodotus, there was a gossipy relish. So there is this element of actually chatting by the campfire, which I think is wonderful. And I think actually if a historian only thinks of himself as undertaking a seminar and not spending time in a company of friends, the thing isn't going to come alive.
Presenter asks
2:02You do get criticised, nevertheless, by those kind of historians who say that you go less for the analysis and more for the atmosphere, that in a sense you're making some of it up. And they consider that it distorts the truth.
Well, I don't think it does at all. I think actually, Macaulay, you're right. Impossible and bigoted and prejudiced in some ways, very profoundly insightful ... and said actually history must be burnt into the imagination before it can be received by the reason. Your first duty is absolutely to connect.
Presenter asks
12:22Can you distil how [John Plum] taught you, what he was doing?
The keepsakes
The book
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
It's an amazing meditation on time. It's the most perfect novelised account, really, and not just something that happened a long time ago, but what time does to us.
The luxury
There are going to be no women on this island and it's going to be a completely lonely experience. It's a painting about the kind of beauty of and also about sorrow of the relationship between men and women.
He he would we would um do incredibly close discussion of a single paragraph. ... There was a sense that actually to make a connection, you needed really to make the furniture of the past, again, another Macaulay phrase, be physically vivid. You'd be no good as a historian if you couldn't describe, let's say, the pockmarks on Mirabeau's face.
Presenter asks
14:04How come you stuck [at Cambridge] so long?
You know, I liked teaching. I was moonlighting. I mean, I was as a journalist. I mean, I did work for the Sunday Times. And I was able to lead this kind of my Walter Mitty fantasy life a couple of days a week working on the colour supplement, doing history features. ... But in the end, it wasn't for me, not to mention the rather important fact that Cambridge would never give me a job. ... I was definitely not their cup of port.
Presenter asks
21:34How did you arrive at [the view that violence was the motor of the French Revolution]?
I didn't set out thinking that was going to be a conclusion. And when I said motor, I did mean that at each stage of the revolution, regimes changed when really, physical force was let loose on whoever the object of current disapproval happened to be. ... This sense in which actually people who are held to be responsible need to be seen to be punished was seen to me tragically always part of the formula and spoiled the party from the beginning.
“Storytelling is crucial. Historians are just the. Holding the baton of this tribal storytelling right between our grandpas and our grandchildren.”
“Gradually as I unpieced this sort of great grandparental history, it was clear that we were that most oxymoronic thing, Jewish lumberjacks.”
“If a reader comes out and says, I have been in this place as close as I will ever get to it, and I have now understood something about the human condition, that's a job reasonably well done.”
“The very last sentences of the book are, for a moment this dog is suspended in mid-air and could be seen in all his doggy animation, worst that affair. And then he became a livid heap of dust. And I thought, well, that's what historians are supposed to do. You're supposed to catch the dog in flight.”