Hello, I'm Kirstie 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 1991,

and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

My cast away this week is a lawyer and a politician. As the Attorney General in the Labour government, at the end of the last war,

he was responsible for leading the British prosecution case at the war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg.

He also prosecuted, as the Convention of the Day demanded,

the murderer Hague and the traitor William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw-Haw.

Having served in cabinet and in opposition, he turned away from active politics at the end of the

fifties. Since then, at the bar in Bordrums and in the House of Lords, he's established himself

as a successful public figure, valued for his skills and his opinions alike.

Now, 89, he's one of the few distinguished men of his generation who has not written his memoirs.

I have nothing to apologise for. He says nothing to explain. He is Lord Shawcross,

but much to recount, I'm sure Lord Shawcross, I can't believe you haven't come under some pressure

to write those memoirs. Well, there has been some talk of it, and I've been trying my hand at

a little writing that I doubt whether anybody would want to publish it.

But you've never been shy about putting pen to paper. You write to newspapers and write articles

quite a lot of the time. What about those important moments in your life, like the Nuremberg trials

or your leaving of the Labour Party or the death of a loved one? Have you not in that moment written

something down? No, I've not written anything about those particular things at the time,

to write a successful memoirs are rather different matter. You have to have sex,

sensation and secrets. I've got no sex that I'm going to disclose, no secrets that I'm prepared

to give away and therefore no sensations. I think it would be very dull. I'm sure it wouldn't be,

...