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Composer
606 episodes
Chosen over the decades
606
Total castaways
1990s
Peak decade
8
Decades seen
Castaways who chose this
Shami Chakrabarti on her earliest political memory of walking to the electric chair
Antonia Fraser on her 'don't come in' notice for writing while raising six children
Eliza Manningham-Buller on the lift ride when she wondered which colleague was a traitor
Jung Chang on her grandmother crying in a mosquito net and cursing the Communists
Vladimir Jurowski on conducting La Bohème the day after his father's heart attack
Raymond Tallis on his father asking why treat old people since everyone dies
Edna O'Brien on her mother burying a censored copy of The Country Girls in a field
Natasha Spender on improvising on the piano to communicate with her father
Raymond Gubbay on the moment his father got him involved in Mozart's Il Seraglio
John Rutter on the out-of-tune upright piano that opened a world of magic at age three
David Hope on following the stations of the cross in Notre Dame before a press conference
Ronald Searle on writing a note saying 'I've gone' and abandoning his old life
Katharine Whitehorn on her husband telling her to get a job on a Hampstead Heath bench
Peter Maxwell Davies on hearing the music he was going to write in a Lake District mist
Virginia McKenna on her father keeping a snake called George and two bush babies
Michael Howard on his aunt surviving three trips to the Auschwitz gas chamber
Diana Athill on discovering the facts of life at age 11 in a book by Mary Stopes
Michael Morpurgo on first seeing his father as a convict in Great Expectations
David Sainsbury on being asked to choose a Henry Moore drawing as a birthday present as a small boy
How seeing an architecture school in Edinburgh set Nicholas Grimshaw's career