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 2004, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a writer in a series of highly popular and scrupulously researched

historical novels, he tells the story of an English soldier in the Napoleonic Wars.

His hero, Richard Sharp, has risen from the ranks and serves under Wellington in India, Spain,

and of course at Waterloo.

Sharp's Creator has experienced a life that sounds as though it comes from a novel, the

illegitimate son of a wartime romance,

he was adopted and brought up by religious fundamentalists who banned television, medicine,

and fun from the house.

He rebelled, became a television producer and then left for America

with the woman he'd married on the promise that he'd provide for them both by writing and

that's exactly what he's done. I'm a storyteller not a historian he says it's not the most difficult thing to do

he is Bernard Cornwall not difficult Bernard if you have the ability to write but what you have to do is spot the gap in the market for fictionalized military

history I dare say.

I guess that's true.

I mean years and years ago I read all the Hombler when I'd finished Hombler there's no more to read

I mean see as far as to tragically only wrote 11.

So I went off and found the non-fiction histories and through those I discovered these amazing stories

about Wellington's Army and I haunted the bookshops thinking somebody must write this series Hornblower on dry land and of

course nobody did and then I thought well why don't you do it? But why the

fascination with Wellington where had that begun and when? I think that the fascination came totally off hornblower and that in turn goes right back to my adopted parents

...