Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
An editor and publisher best known for co-founding Virago, the feminist publishing house, and editing Index on Censorship.
On the island
Eight records
Flute Sonata in B minor, BWV 1030: I. Andante
Alexandre Magnin and Robert Hergrove
really connected with my family's musicality. We were a very musical family and we all played. Um my father played the flute, my mother played the violin. My brother played the cello and my sister and I both played the piano, and we played a lot together. And I the the thing I perhaps most remember is playing these Bach flute sonatas with my father.
I married a Welshman who I met at Oxford, Roger, who was a h is was and is a historian, and he came from a Welsh family. He they didn't live in Wales any more, but he his background meant a great deal to him. And I love male voice choirs, they give me goose pimples.
quite simply, it's a song I sang to my daughter to to help her go to sleep, and a song I still sing to my granddaughter to help her go to sleep. She's a lot less good at sleeping, and it's a song I love.
String Quartet in B-flat major, Op. 76, No. 4 "Sunrise": I. Allegro con spirito
This has to stand in for a great deal of chamber music as far as I'm concerned. I didn't know how to choose it, but I love this particularly because I suppose there was a moment in my life when I I was quite a melancholy child, where I thought one can choose to be happy. It's the sort of life is a glass of water half full or half empty proposition really. And I think this is such a most most wonderfully tender and optimistic piece of music.
Die schöne Magelone, Op. 33: IX. Ruhe, Süßliebchen
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore
I remember going to this concert at the festival hall with my mother and an aunt. of Dietrich Fischer Diska singing a very rather unknown song cycle by Brahms, Dishona Margalona. And I remember being absolutely riveted. I was sitting in the back of the hall. We sat in the back of the hall and thinking I would love to accompany a singer like that.
On that same visit to Berlin, um, we crossed over to East Berlin. It was um in the late seventies. And we went to the Kumashu Opa, where there was the Breci Company was performing, and they were absolutely wonderful. I always remember it vividly because there was this extraordinarily lively performance.
my mother wa was ill some of the time in my teens and We used to visit her in hospital on Sundays and then come back and I Always remember the feeling of Sadness and sort of pit of the stomach, and going back to the house when she wasn't there. And I think I thought I was the only person in the world who felt gloomy on Sundays. And then of course later I discovered that everyone feels gloomy on Sundays at about between four and six in the afternoon.
Der Rosenkavalier, Op. 59: Act III Trio "Hab' mir's gelobt"Favourite
I suppose a record of reconciliation. Um it's the third act of Rose and Cavalier, the trio with Marshaline and Sophie and Octavian. And I suppose it once again it has to represent opera, which is ridiculous. I mean, I love Mozart, I love Verdi, and I just didn't have space for them all. So this represents opera, but it also represents quite one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written, and a kind of reconciliation and a kind of acceptance that love ends and life goes on, and also, I suppose, perhaps slightly sneakily, that, of course, much the most interesting relationship of those two was the older woman with the younger man rather than the two young ones together.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:23Was it incredible foresight on your parents' part to have you born in England?
It was incredible foresight. A friend of theirs actually suggested to my mother, even in nineteen thirty three, just after Hitler had got in, that my brother should be born in England, that it would be useful, that this was all going to end badly. So when I was born in nineteen thirty seven, she came to Oxford, where she had relatives. And I was born, and she remained six weeks, and went back. I then left Germany eighteen months later.
Presenter asks
2:34Did your parents attempt to reinvent the family and make you very English once you were here?
Well, they did what I think probably, you know, was the only thing to do. They remained utterly themselves. They were German and they spoke German to us and we spoke English to them, so we're curiously bilingual. And they never tried to be what they weren't or whatever. But they converted to Christianity... they did want us to be English, which in a way I suppose was completely understandable. They wanted us to belong.
Presenter asks
5:49How did your family manage to get your grandfather's Bechstein piano out of Nazi Germany?
Well, I think the strange thing about all these events, i these exiles, these these throwings out, is that they always have aspects that you you don't understand. I mean, in fact, my family, my my immediate family, was lucky and we came out with a lot of things, including this wonderful Best Strain Grand, but also you know, china and crockery and silver.
The keepsakes
The book
The Collected Works of Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov
I think in the end I'd like to take the collected works of Chekhov, because each time I see the plays and each time I read them, ah, I find something new in them. They're extraordinary.
The luxury
A large photograph album filled with family and friends
actually what I want, I realise, is a large photograph album filled with my family and friends and people I love. I'm afraid I will miss people a lot on this island.
Presenter asks
7:51How did you end up being a prime mover in two outspoken enterprises like Index on Censorship and Virago when you were such a conformist, silent child?
No, it's curious. I think probably the women's movement had a good deal to do with... the women's movement was a lot about people women starting to talk. My daughter would say too much talk, but anyway, I think I learned a lot from it.
Presenter asks
8:15Was it when you got to Oxford that you suddenly thought you had a voice?
Yes, it was. And it was partly because I I went to a school where politics was not much part of life... And I went to Oxford at the time of Suez and Hungary. And I got there, and within three weeks there were people were talking this language that I'd never heard before, and I was incredibly excited by it. And I suppose that was the first stirrings of Socialism actually.
Presenter asks
14:58Is it fair to say that Carmen Callil had the business idea and contacts for Virago, while you brought the intellectual rigor from the feminist movement?
No, I don't think it is fair. I think that uh I I came from somewhere very different from Carmen. I um I was by then very much part of the women's movement. I was in a group that met once a week for seven years actually. And I sort of and Carmen c came from publishing and had a different background. But I think it was actually a very fruitful professional relationship.
Presenter asks
29:06Are there situations in which freedom of speech shouldn't be allowed because words can foment war and hatred?
Well I think that's also some one of the interesting things about doing this job at this moment in time is that I think these debates have to be had now. And my own view of that is that it's a very tricky business to ever say that absolute right of freedom of expression should be curtailed, but I my view is that if hate speech gets to the point where a culture of hatred is created. and people feel there's permission given to hate... I think we have to talk about whether there may be some way in which we ought to censor.
“I think the truth of the matter is I've never been totally comfortable with being an outsider, and I I think also lots of people feel outsiders, people who seem like insiders. But I think I have eternal longings to belong and I'm sure I never will, not properly.”
“I think we what we didn't predict and what we didn't predict for ourselves was the incredible conflict we would feel about if we had children as well as worked.”
“I was a burnt out case about the quarrels, really, and I I just thought it was absurd.”
“I stood by the house and I found myself weeping. And I it was the first time I really sort of dug into my roots and also uh sort of saw saw my parents, these young people, living in this house, having to deal with all this terrible stuff and making these enormous decisions.”