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 1991, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is an author and an adventurer.

Now 93 and living in retirement in a house he built himself on Corfu,

he can look back on a career of extraordinary variety.

He was a fighter pilot in the First World War, tangled with the red

baron and was decorated for bravery. In the 30s he wrote a book which prompted George Bernard Shaw to

say he is a thinker, a master of words and a bit of a poet.

After that he helped Lord Wreath invent the BBC, but bored by the bureaucracy of the corporation,

he went off to Hollywood and won an Oscar for a screenplay.

I could go on, but instead let me tell you his name.

He is Cecil Lewis.

It was in 1936, I think, that George Bernard Shaw, Mr Lewis, said that you led a charmed life.

Has that gone on being true, do you think?

All my life.

It's been just one wonderful thing after another, and that's gone on in an extraordinary way for

forever and ever.

Amen.

Have you been lucky in love as well?

Oh, this is a very difficult question.

Yes, I would say I would be very very lucky in love, but if I started telling you the details, it would be quite unprinable.

So I think we better pass on from that wonderful subject, which I should have to spend all the rest of the day talking to you about.

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