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

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

The program was originally broadcast in 1979, and the presenter was Roy Plumlee. This week our castaway as a writer, historian, essays, novelist, and biographer, and a man whose name has been given to a celebrated law, C. Northcoat Parkinson.

Professor Parkinson, you're a man of many interest, is music one of them?

Yes and no.

I was brought up in a very artistic household taking that in that term in a wide sense.

My father was a painter, a rather good painter. My mother was a pianist and the daughter of a professional musician who was a choir trainer and a conductor.

And close by was... trainer and a conductor.

And close by was Yorkminster presided over in those days by Sir Edward Birstow, I mean

on the musical side, remembered in many churches throughout England as I think

birtsto in E flat. So I had a musical background to that extent.

Do you play discs?

I don't play discs.

I am too busy writing books, which is my trade, and I've never thought of a way of playing

discs to any profit, so I write books instead. Now what's the first of the eight records you've chosen?

Well, I've taken them in a sort of autobiographical order.

Yes.

And so my mind goes back in my early days to various rounds, catches or cannons, and goes to the earliest of them all, which is that old and delightful song,

Summer is I come in. Coo co co co co co co s s'a hiccoue c c c c cuz ca d ca ca ca ca ca ca ca ca ca ca ca ca ca ca ca ca ca ca ca ca ca ca ca ca ca ca ca And he's from the sun that you know,

see with so and blood and strings in the cold

from from the cold and soft and d'of a d'clock

and d'n't have no sincte'clock and d'n'n't that no sincte' snothe fount of the world of and sary stup,

...