Hello I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My cousin My castaway this week is Professor Liza Jardin, historian, biographer, public thinker mathematician,

her proclivities are wide-ranging and her work very well regarded with prize-winning

books on subjects as diverse as Sir Christopher Wren, 17th century Holland, Erasmus, and women in the time of Shakespeare.

Her current day job is directing the centre for lives and letters at University College London.

If that seems a little ivory tower for your tastes, think again.

As chair of the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority for many years, she was at the sharp

end of the complex conundrums and high emotion that surround the artificial creation of life,

leading the world in developing the legal framework that governs IVF treatment.

Her rigor and originality then are greatly admired and both seem to have been in evidence since the beginning.

Her schoolgirl contemporaries had pictures of Elvis by their beds, but Lisa had other ideas.

Not for her, the snake-hipped king of rock and roll. No, as a teenager, she gazed

lovingly at a photo of a brilliant, albeit handsome Indian mathematician. She says,

I only do things I love and I love everything I do.

Welcome, Professor Lisa Jardine.

Thank you for having me.

Being an original thinker who ranges across so many subjects very

knowledgeable and in such great depth must surely require a huge

amount of focus and energy. Do you ever flag? I didn't use to flag. You know everybody has to admit that when they pass 60 they begin to flag a little

It isn't exactly the capaciousness. I have a kind of thing which I think is hardwired and I know other people who have it

...