Ann Leslie

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 7 November 2004

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the distinguished foreign correspondent Ann Leslie. She has witnessed and reported on some of the most significant events of the past 30 years including the fall of the Berlin wall; the failed coup against Michael Gorbachev and Nelson Mandela's final walk to freedom. She has reported on uprisings, massacres and wars, collecting numerous awards as she has done so.

She grew up in India and Pakistan and loved India and its culture. When she was around 10 years old she was sent to a boarding school in England. From school she went to Oxford and from there she joined the Daily Express. She was brought to London and was given her own column at the age of twenty-two. But she resigned, saying she wanted to do proper reporting, and it was David English's support for her that saw her start writing foreign news stories and set the course for her distinguished career.

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

Favourite track: Improvisation - The Theme Music Pather Panchali by Ravi Shankar Book: Completed Works by P G Wodehouse Luxury: An enormous amount of garlic with a garlic press

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2004, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a journalist for the past 30 years or more she's travelled the world
0:35.6	writing as it's been called the first rough drafts of history reporting on events such as
0:40.4	the fall of the Berlin Wall the attempted coup against Gorbachev or Nelson Mandela's
0:44.9	walk to freedom.
0:46.7	She was born in India, sent back to convent school in England by a rather careless mother, but
0:52.0	escaped early to Oxford University where she read English and
0:55.1	went man hunting, her phrase, for the first time.
0:58.6	She had her own column on the Daily Express at the age of 22, but really learned her trade there and the daily mail
1:05.1	under the watchful eye of the editor David English.
1:08.2	The Doyenne of English journalism, she's been everywhere and reported on just about everything. Bloody-minded, gravel voiced, and
1:15.4	remorselessly fluent. She is, she admits, quote, not unlike PG Woodhouse's fierce Aunt Agatha, who ate broken bottles and wore barbed wire next to the skin.
1:25.9	She is Anne Leslie.
1:27.8	Not Anne that that's an image you would necessarily promote as I understand it when you're out in the
1:31.4	field because you like playing the kind of
1:33.1	brainless bird don't you? Well in the sort of countries I tend to work in they're
1:38.0	very contemptuous of women and the way to get round this problem with them is to be as bird-brained as you possibly can,
1:46.7	because they don't see you as a threat.
1:48.5	And I always remember Dame Freya Stark, who is the wonderful adventurer who used to go to mad, bad and dangerous countries,
1:55.3	and she wrote that the great advantage of being a woman is that we can always pretend to be
2:00.4	more stupid than you are and everyone believes you.
	...

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