This download is the only extract the BBC has of this edition of desert island discs. The presenter was Roy Plumley

Lord David, at Oxford you read modern history and took a first. Had you then any ambition to write?

Oh yes indeed, I had. My ambition was to write the game very much earlier. In fact, I can't remember when they were non-existent. What was your first book?

My first book was after I'd been in the Donut Oxford for some years. It was a book, a life of Cooper, the poet called The Sick and Dear. And that came out I think in 98.

Yes. Now you were a Donut Oxford at Wadham. Was teaching a vocational thing. Had you had any particular ideas in teaching you wanted to put it into practice?

Not when I started. I wanted to be a writer, but my father very probably said I would have a regular professor and I looked around and I thought if I could manage to get it,

I would like to be a Donut, especially a literature. And then when I began it, I found I enjoyed teaching very much. And I have evolved ideas since which I believe in.

Though they're not, I think, especially individual. But it wasn't a vocation in that sense that I always felt called to do it.

From Wadham, you became a fellow in tutor at New College and since 1948 you held the Goldsmith Chair of English Literature.

Because of your university duties, your literary output has been rather small. One book every three or four years I suppose?

Yes. That was one period, which it was not so small, where I left Wadham after my first book after the Stricken Deer and settled away from Oxford as a freelance writer.

I got married and went to live in the country. And then I suppose even then it wasn't very quick, but I did write two books, the early Victorian novelists.

And the first half of my book on Melbourne, the first volume within a fairly short number of years.

You are a grounds on of Lord Saul's story, the Victorian Prime Minister. Did his figure still, when you were a child, have a great influence over the family? Did you ever know him?

No, no. I was a year old when he died. I wish I hadn't known him. Yes, he did have an influence. He'd been a very big person editor.

And he'd had the five or six children who would all be very fond of him, and I think had been influenced by him, though they didn't all quite agree with him.

But it is true to say, I think, that his particular attitude to life and because of realism and religion and salty, with a good deal of irony and humor, did pervade the apples fairly much I grew up.

Have you ever had any political ambitions or so? No. I knew nothing but politicians or the sound of the child. I was very fond of them all, and I never wanted to follow them.

Now, your biographies, Cooper, Melbourne, Max Birburn, others, how do you set about a biography like this?

Well, I always think that biography is the portrait painting of literature. And as an importer, you go and look at the person.

So, well, I literally do that. I look at pictures of them. But of course, it's more important to look at their mind and the best thing about what is something they've said themselves.

Do you do field work? Oh, a lot of field work, one has to. I read that letters, then it dyes, and if anybody who knew them had written about them.

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