Diana Athill

Diana Athill

Author: BBC Radio 4 June 20, 2004 Duration: 37:31

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the writer and book editor Diana Athill. For nearly 50 years Diana Athill was involved in every aspect of publishing, from editing and even completely rewriting books to drawing adverts, designing covers and nursing authors for the publishing house Andre Deutsch. They published some of the greatest names of the 20th century, including Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, VS Naipaul and Jean Rhys.

Her career has been remarkable, but it was one that she fell into after her original plans for marriage and children fell through. Now aged 86, she is still writing and her novel Make Believe is being republished this autumn - and she still visits the Norfolk estate owned by her family where she spent so much time as a girl riding horses.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: O Glucklich Paar by Franz Joseph Haydn Book: Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray Luxury: Her own bed


The Desert Island Discs: Archive 2000-2005 podcast opens a unique window into a pivotal era, drawing from the BBC Radio 4 archives. This isn't just a collection of interviews about music; it's a deeply personal exploration of life, ambition, and memory through the voices of the early 21st century. Each episode presents a guest from this period-be they an artist, a politician, a scientist, or an activist-facing the program's enduring and revealing premise: selecting the eight pieces of music they would take if stranded alone. The conversation that unfolds around these choices is where the magic happens. The host gently guides them from their selections into stories of childhood influences, career-defining moments, personal triumphs, and profound losses. You'll hear the crackle of a vinyl record lead into a confession, or a symphony cue a tale of resilience. Listening to this podcast feels like uncovering a time capsule of cultural and emotional history, where a pop song can explain a political stance and a classical adagio can frame a love story. It’s an intimate study of character and a testament to how the soundtrack of our lives shapes our identity. These archived conversations, preserved in this podcast, remain compelling because they bypass the superficial, using music as the key to unlock genuine human experience.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Desert Island Discs: Archive 2000-2005
Podcast Episodes
P D James [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 36:28
P D James was born in Oxford, later moving to Ludlow on the Welsh Borders where she experienced a childhood which she says had more in common with a Victorian childhood than anything today. She was a well-behaved, quiet…
Carl Djerassi [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 36:17
Carl Djerassi was born in Vienna to an Austrian mother and Bulgarian father. Both parents were involved in the medical profession and, growing up surrounded by medical paraphernalia, he assumed that he would become a doc…
Paul Gambaccini [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 34:05
Paul Gambaccini was born in New York City in 1949 and revelled growing up to the sounds of the 1960s. He loved listening to the radio and chose to go to Dartmouth College in preference to Harvard or Yale because it had a…
Philip Pullman [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 37:00
Philip Pullman is the author of the celebrated His Dark Materials trilogy: Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. He was born in Norwich and spent his early years travelling all over the world with his…
Dame Alicia Markova [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 43:43
Dame Alicia Markova was born Lilian Alice Marks in December 1910, in a two-bedroom flat in Finsbury Park, London. She began ballet classes because she was flat footed and knock kneed. Her natural talent, when she was ten…
Timothy Spall [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 33:32
Timothy Spall grew up in Battersea, South London. He found school pretty uninspiring and left with art as his only qualification. However, when he played the part of the Cowardly Lion in the school production of The Wiza…
Brian May [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 36:55
Brian May spent his childhood in Feltham near London and he learnt his first chords on his father's ukelele banjo. He soon progressed to the guitar, which he started learning when he was eight. He perfected his technique…
Alan Titchmarsh [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 37:02
Alan Titchmarsh was drawn to gardening from an early age in Ilkley, Yorkshire, making his first polythene greenhouse at the age of twelve and deciding he was going to be a gardener when he grew up. He left school at fift…
Minette Walters [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 36:38
After Minette Walters' father died of injuries sustained in World War II she won a scholarship to Godolphin School, and eventually became Head Girl. From a young age she shunned girls' story books, preferring the more gr…

«1...678910