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 2001, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is an aristocrat. He hopes he'll be remembered as a painter and a writer,

but his unconventional lifestyle suggests that he'll more easily come to mind as the man who had 74 lovers and owned one of England's most famous stately homes.

Public school, the Army and Oxford failed to extinguish his ambition to become an artist

and after he'd begun to live permanently in the family home he

began covering its walls with murals he's also built up a very successful business

the estate had more than 400,000 paying visitors last year, while all the time maintaining his belief in what he terms individualism.

My entire background, he says, is one of isolation.

He's the owner of Longleyat, Alexander, the seventh Marquis of Bath.

And indeed you live alone a lot of the time, Alexander, don't you, despite your many and much

publicised wifelets.

Do you actually live in Longley, the house?

Yes, one third of the house I've lived in since 1953,

and I've now got a, shall we call it,

a penthouse suite on the top of a house where I regard as even more

specially my own.

It sounds very grand a penthouse suite.

What's it like?

Describe it to me.

Well in the top corner of Longleyat I look out over two sides,

over the garden and over the park where there are the lakes and the lions.

...