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Desert Island Discs

Christina Lamb

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.413.7K Ratings

🗓️ 22 January 2018

⏱️ 35 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Christina Lamb is chief foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times and travels the world reporting from war zones and hot spots, speaking not just to key protagonists but also seeking out and detailing the daily impact of conflict on civilians. An only child, and brought up in Carshalton Beeches, she was a voracious reader and dreamed of being an explorer. Although she was rebellious at school, and at one point was asked to leave, she won a place at Oxford and went on to edit the university newspaper. While working as an intern for the Financial Times, she interviewed Benazir Bhutto and was invited to her wedding in Pakistan. That experience led to her determination to be a reporter from the front line. Her work has taken her to South Africa, Brazil, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, and among her best-selling books are two which tell the stories of remarkable young women - Nujeen Mustafa who escaped from Aleppo in her wheelchair, and the Nobel prize-winner Malala Yousafzai. Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

This is the BBC.

0:03.0

Hello, I'm Kristi Young.

0:05.0

Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, the book and the luxury item

0:12.0

that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island.

0:16.0

For rights reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast.

0:22.0

You can find over 2,000 more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Discs website.

0:30.0

Music

0:50.0

My castaway this week is the journalist and author, Kristina Lam.

0:54.0

Over the past three decades, she has travelled the world, reporting from the Amazon to Zimbabwe.

1:00.0

But it's her first hand accounts of the turmoil in the Middle East that have secured her reputation as a first-class war reporter.

1:07.0

Whether dodging bullets in Hellman or having clandestine meetings with Taliban chiefs in the back streets of Kweta, her nose for a story has repeatedly led her into perilous territory.

1:18.0

She seems to like it.

1:20.0

The cobalt blue mosques and sweet grapes of Kandahar are something of a contrast to the suburban England of her comfortable 1970s childhood,

1:28.0

where she rebelled against the starchy uniformity of her grammar school and dren't of a life of adventure beyond Kroyton.

1:35.0

She has, she says, navigated through roadblocks manned by red-eyed drug-crazed boys with Kalashnikovs in West Africa,

1:42.0

been abducted in the middle of the night by Pakistani intelligence and come under sniper fire in Iraq.

1:48.0

All around me, she says, people have died. My life, I believe, is charmed.

1:53.0

And that strikes me, Kristina Lam, as quite a dangerous thing to think that your life has been charmed.

1:59.0

Well, explain it to me.

2:01.0

I suppose, I mean, listening to it does sound like a dangerous thing to say.

2:07.0

I guess doing this kind of job, you have lots of narrow escapes and that you feel that luck plays a part of your survival,

2:19.0

and I've had far more than my nine lives by now.

...

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