David Starkey

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Music, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Music Commentary

4.3 • 14.3K Ratings

🗓️ 6 February 2005

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is Dr David Starkey. Dr David Starkey forsook the ivory towers of academia to popularise history as a constitutional commentator in the press and as a broadcaster and writer. His approach to history is a personal one; he explains events through the lens of individual hopes, flaws and lusts and says historical influence can be seen in terms of who are "the movers and shakers and the bottom wipers" in the royal court. Their equivalent can be seen in government today, he says, through the unelected advisers who take their seat on the Downing Street sofa.

Born into a working class, Quaker family in Kendal, David's formidable drive owes much to his mother's love and ambitions for her only child. David's feeling that history should not be the preserve of academics, but belongs to the public, set him on a path to a TV career, via Cambridge, the LSE, and his infamous performances on Radio 4's The Moral Maze which earned him the title of 'the rudest man in Britain'. Now, his programmes are watched by millions and his books are bestsellers.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Dove Sono by ozart Book: Microcosmographia Academica by Francis M Cornford Luxury: Hot and cold running water, bath tub and bath oil

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2005, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a historian, clever, articulate and good at popular performance he spent the last few years
0:34.8	bringing to life on television some of England's more interesting Kings and Queens.
0:39.9	He graduated to the small screen from radio where his performance on the moral maze
0:44.3	earned him the title of rudest man in Britain from the Daily Mail.
0:48.0	An only child from a working class background in Kendall in Cumbria. He won a scholarship to Cambridge, a
0:54.3	first-class degree and the life of a distinguished academic at the LSE. Lured
0:59.2	into writing for newspapers on the constitutional matters surrounding the royal family, he moved naturally
1:05.0	and authoritatively into television. The rest, well all of it actually, is history.
1:10.5	I treat conversation as a boxing match, he when you write you write the truth but you talk to win he is David
1:18.7	Starkey to be fair you've attributed that quote it is Samuel Johnson isn't it David?
1:23.0	It is indeed Sue the last thing that I would try to do was usurp the great panjandaram
1:28.5	himself. It would be very foolish. But the point is that there are at least two David Stark is the talking one and the writing one isn't there and that's the point that the one flies off without restraint and the other you know
1:41.1	Michael Burke said that anyway but the other one wants to get it
1:44.3	absolutely right what is it that makes the difference?
1:47.6	Talk is quick is light flowing it's there essentially to express the word that comes to you.
1:56.0	Writing is quite different.
1:58.0	Writing is the word that comes and then is rejected and is thought about and tried again.
2:03.2	It's the ultimate vanity of the author.
2:05.2	But it's also the ultimate vanity of the performer, isn't it?
2:07.8	Because you're turned on by performers.
	...

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