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 1986, and the presenter was Michael Parkinson. It's more than likely that our castaway will already have visited whichever desert island we banish him too.

He spent a lifetime traveling the world and writing about it quite brilliantly in books like Naples 44,

Voices of the Old Sea and the Golden Earth.

His book about the mafia called The Honor Society, and his novel on the same theme,

the Sicilian specialist, mark him as a writer of unusual range and talent.

The critics, Cyril Connolly, said he was talented enough to make even discretion. range and

Tritainty said he was talented enough to make even describing a lorry interesting

and V. S. Pritchett said he goes in deep like a sharp polished knife.

His life has been an extraordinary one described in a remarkable volume of memoirs called Jackdore Cake, the author Norman Lewis.

Norman, reading your book, one gets a sense that you're're born traveler that you always wanted to move

around the world.

Do you daydream as a child about faraway places?

Be sure I daydreamed as a child about faraway places and I can give you an idea why.

I had the fortune or misfortune to be largely brought up by three aunts.

Most people would have considered extremely mad.

And they kept me in a kind of subjection in a fairly large house in a remote

country town called Kamarthen, the Welsh town.

And I did daydream about traveling continually.

So the very first opportunity came to travel, I travelled.

But why would we think of them as mad?

...