You're about to listen to a BBC podcast, but this is about something else you might enjoy.

My name's Katie Lecky and I'm an assistant commissioner for on demand music on BBC Sounds.

The BBC has an incredible musical heritage and culture and as a music lover, I love being part of that.

With music on sounds, we offer collections and mixes for everything, from workouts to helping

you nod off, boogie in your kitchen, or even just a moment of calm. And they're all put together

by people who know their stuff. So if you want some expertly curated music in your life,

check out BBC Sounds. Hello, I'm Krista 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 2006, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Music My castaway this week is a literary scholar. He became an academic by a curious route, born into a working-class

family. He never knew his father, who was killed in the war, and after a peripatetic childhood,

he joined the army. With no war to fight, he decided to leave his commission and go to university

instead. Today, he's a preeminent literary figure, combining erudition and historical research

with a taste for the modern and the new. His book on Victorian fiction is a standard text. He's

written biographies, most recently that of Stephen Spender. His literary puzzle and quiz books

is Heathcliff a murderer, so you think you know Jane Austen, a bestseller's, and he has a regular column in The Guardian. He's also the pioneer of book summaries on mobile phones in text form. Hence, pride and prejudice becomes every one gets murdered. A reformed alcoholic, he says he's now going to write his autobiography because, quote, I'm at that stage in life when my own life interests me more than other peoples. He's the recently retired Lord Northcliffe Professor of English Literature at University College London, John Sutherland. And you were chairman of the Booker, of course, recently. Booker judges, John.

It's a distinguished career for someone who's got this

working class background, no apparent family history

of academic study. You must have looked into your own

background, the same as you do into those of your subjects. Have you come

up with any explanation for your academic bent?

I was very lucky. Obviously, I was no cleverer than my antecedents. It just so happened

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