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 Lolley

Music

My cast away this week is a publisher. Her background is impeccably up her middle class

Her attitude uniquely avant-garde

She was born as Ed Wardion England had collapsed into the First World War

and enjoyed the tail-end benefits of an expansive age, a grand house, lots of servants, plenty of horses

By the time another war had come and gone, she joined forces with the publisher Andre Deutsch

working with such writers as VS Nipole, Molly Keene and Jean Reese

She was acknowledged as the finest editor in London and before and since her retirement

she's written a series of confessional and much acclaimed memoirs about her colourful and unusual life

There's no point in writing from personal experience, she says, unless you try to be as honest as you can

She is Diana Atill

And you've been painfully honest Diana, you've identified all sorts of what you've called indecent truths about yourself

It's as if you've always been observing yourself and noting down every detail, is that's how it's felt?

I think that is true, I was always right from the beginning when I was quite quite young

I felt that I was always conscious and watching everything that I did

and everything I experienced, it worried me

I used to think when am I going to be so involved in something that I'd stop watching

But how could you escape from yourself?

I used to think if I was madly in love

...