Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My My castaway this week is the writer and historian Paul Johnson. He writes he says out of a desire to put things right.

More than 50 books and thousands of articles have flowed

from his pen. Sweeping works about modernity, morality, art and philosophy sit alongside

fiercely opinionated biographies and essays.

He's met countless presidents and prime ministers.

He asked Margaret Thatcher out on a date,

dished out advice to Tony Blair,

and as a boy asked Churchill the secret of his success.

His opinions have provoked, offended and enraged plenty of people over the years,

yet he says it was his mother who first suggested how he should form his thoughts.

She said, you should be like Jesus and always be on the side of the poor.

That's a very interesting piece of advice, Paul Johnson. Did you try to take it?

I remember everything my mother said to me and I've always tried to take her advice and when I failed it's because I didn't.

She also believed that the world was divided into sheep and goats and her sheep were

very white and her goats as black as pitch you have written.

Do you think we all really crave a world like that where it's easy to define the difference

between right and wrong.

Well, of course, that's what you're taught.

I mean, the most important thing in my life was being born a Catholic,

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