Hello, I'm Krestey 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 2008. My castaway this week is the writer Antonia Fraser, an internationally regarded historian, her best-selling books are credited with bringing the

past to life through great human understanding, scholarship and a vivid readability.

And along with her husband, the playwright Harold Pinter, she has been at the very

center of London's Littorati for well over 30 years. The eldest daughter of

a family of literary longfords, her love affair with the past started young.

It was as a schoolgirl running to and from the local library that her private passion began.

History, she says, was like a huge playground. It was just a delight.

I'm wondering, Antonio Fraser, as you sit there and it takes you years to do the research for these great historical books that you write, how much of a playground

it feels when you have piles of manuscripts and papers to look through these days.

I think the moment when it's not quite such a playground, when you have to sit down and actually write the book and make sense of it all.

But I love research. I do all my own research and I enjoy it unless I get someone to do something specific in which case I acknowledge it.

But that's why I call it a playground.

You know, here is history, all of it, masses of it, so many countries,

so many centuries, all for me to study.

And you say when you come to writing, I think this must be quite an unusual way of writing.

You do your research quite often for three or four years.

Yes.

And then you sit down and write.

You don't research and write at the same time no I don't but I know

numbers of people who I respect very much including my mother Elizabeth Longford

...