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 1982, and the presenter was Roy Plumley. This week our cast away is the writer and traveler Eric Newby.

Eric I've been reading several of your books which are mainly autobiographical.

I don't remember coming across anything about your musical taste. Is music important to you?

Yes, it is in a sense important to me, although for large portions of my life I've had to live without it and live more or less on the memory of it.

Have you any musicals killed yourself? Do you play an instrument or play the piano? Do sing?

No, I'm certainly not allowed to sing.

In any band of singers, I'm immediately identified and rushed to the exit.

In fact, I had a musical teacher against my will when I was young a French lady with a large

mustache.

I think it was a mustache that put me off.

I never got very far with that.

This was the piano?

The piano.

Did you have any kind of plan in choosing your eight discs?

Yes, I did. I know that some of my choices would probably seem awfully corny, but they're probably corny in a sense because a lot of other people like them and one hears them an awful lot.

I think that other choices, or most of the choices one would make being alone on a desert

island and away from all the people you knew and loved and everything

would be remembering happy times or otherwise or evoked by the music you were

listening to or whatever you happen to be listening to if it wasn't music.

Nostagic choices.

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