Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1977, and the presenter was Roy Plumlee. For this week our castaway is the historian, biographer, poet and essayist Dr A L. Rouse.

Now Dr. Rouse you've been choosing music for your Desert Island. You taught yourself to play the piano, I believe.

I don't know how you discovered that, but it is true. I only wish to goodness I'd been taught properly you know because it really gave me awful

difficulty and in the end I rather disillusionedly gave it up for gardening.

You don't play records very much.

I used to play them quite a bit but I'm afraid gardening

has really pushed them out. Well we brought with us to your home in Cornwall the

records that you asked to hear and you've selected your age.

So let's start right away with the first one.

Well, since I'm cast away on the desert island,

I should need cheering up, shouldn't I?

And I can't imagine anything more blithe and joyous and cheerful

than Bach's, uh, Brandenburg concertos. What about number five which is positively Blithe? The The Oh, The Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra conducted by

Carl Munchinger.

You were born just a mile or two from this lovely Regency house overlooking the sea.

You knew this house as a child?

Yes, I knew it as a school boy, rather. I used to come down to it and in those days it was never wholly

occupied. I used to sit on the hedge. That's the

cornish word for a great big granite wall by the way and wonder why on earth I

wasn't really living in it. Well I have been living in it now for the last quarter

...