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 1988, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

My guest on Desert Island Discs this week is best known for being a wife, but that description

alone is unfair and does her less than justice. She won a first at Oxford, she's a fellow

of Noonam College Cambridge and is a world authority on solar energy. Last year she was involved

in a notorious court case in which her husband Jeffrey sued a newspaper for libel. She is Mary Archer.

Mary Archer, if I were to describe you as a very private person married to a very public man,

would you argue with that? I think I wouldn't have done, though I find myself more in the public eye

now, for example, appearing on a program like this. I think I am, however, basically,

rather a private person, happy to be solitary, happy to be alone with the things I like to do.

And what are those things? How does the private person, where does the private person find refuge?

Well, first of all, in work, I am a scientist, and that's always been a source of enormous

pleasure to me, to read about science, to listen to other people talk about it, to do it myself.

So that's an important solace. And then music is also very important to me, so this is particularly

attractive program as far as I'm concerned. I've always loved music and particularly loved singing.

Do you come from a musical family? My father was a musical. He used to play the piano every

evening after work, and I would often play with him, or more particularly sing with him. We had

lots of songbooks, of folk songs, and old English songs, and little operatic areas, and so forth,

and we worked through a tremendous repertoire together. Can we hear your first record?

My first record is an organ voluntary by Walter Davis, here played by George Tholman Ball,

who was organist at the Temple Church in London. My father, as I said, loved organ music,

...