Hello, I'm Krestey 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 1994, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a journalist recruited by Lord Beaverbrook to work on the

London evening standard he spent 38 years as the paper's chief theatre critic

he reckons to have been to 5,500 first nights but but no great plays, simply because he says no great plays were written.

He was born in Toronto and came to Britain as an intelligence officer in the last war, after which

he wrote the first account of how the Germans

lost the war, defeat in the West.

He's lived here ever since, writing, reviewing and producing television and all the time enlivening

the nation's media with his stories and his controversial opinions.

He is Milton Schulman.

You've lived here for 50, some 50 years, Milton, but you only some 10 years ago took British citizenship. Why did you suddenly do that?

Well up until then, the Canadians were more or less British citizens, at least I thought

though we were subject to the Queen. I didn't see any point in that I had a certain loyalty to Canada

But when I tried to get public lending rights for the ten books that I've written, I discovered that I couldn't.

So this annoyed me.

Then I discovered very shortly afterwards that I could get double citizenship,

that I didn't have to lose my Canadian ship,

and I could still be a British citizen.

So I applied.

And having applied a year later, I still hadn't had any word for them.

So I phoned them up one day and so how long is it going to be before I get my British

...