Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For Wright's reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1982, and the presenter was Roy Plumlee. We've cast away on our desert island this week, the historian and biographer Martin Gilbert.

First question is, how well could you endure loneliness?

Well, I've never really had to experience it, and I can't say I'm looking forward to it, but no doubt with the help of these records I'll stagger through somehow.

Just eight records. How much of an interest in music do you have? Is it important?

I'm totally unmusical, at the same time I always enjoy listening

to music and strangely enough I find I can write better if there's some musical background.

Really? Even when you're doing creative writing apart from

researching. Yes I can't do it with vocal music but any form of orchestral or even

sometimes a fine solo violin it seems to focus my mind on the documents, although not blotting out the music.

Have you any musical skill yourself to sing or play the piano or whatever?

None at all. I embarked on piano lessons at school. Martindale Sidwell attempted to put my fingers onto the right keys, but it didn't work, and I abandoned it, I think, at the age of about 11.

Oh dear.

What's the first record you've chosen? Well the first record is actually the

first song I can remember when I went as a boy three and a half to Canada during the

war. As an evacuee. As an evacuee and felt intensely patriotic

but the only bit of England that seemed to be around me was my aunt

and there was a song which suddenly became popular as I recall it.

There'll always be in England and I felt well this really is where I belong

and the people about whom this song is sung they are my people.

You were hearing it of course in Canada?

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