Hello I'm Kirsty 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 Lolly. 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 Austin a best

sellers 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 everyone gets Murred. A reformed

alcoholic he says he's now going to write his autobiography because

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 I was born at a time when the opportunities were there.

And also, I think it's all the unremembered, often remembered acts of assistance and kindness and interests actually. It's people taking

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