Rory Stewart

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 20 January 2008

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the former diplomat, traveller and writer, Rory Stewart. His life has been part establishment convention, part wild adventure. He went to Eton, Oxford and then joined the Foreign Office, but along the way spent part of his childhood running wild in the jungles of Malaysia. He was based in Kosovo during the Nato campaign and, at the age of 29, turned up in Iraq and volunteered to help in the rebuilding work. He ended up running one of the provinces. He remains fiercely critical of the war and has written a well-received book about his experiences there.

The event that has changed his outlook on life was the decision he made to walk 6,000 miles across Asia. It took the best part of two years and throughout the journey he relied on the hospitality of villagers to give him food and shelter. Now he spends most of his time in Kabul where he has set up a charity to support traditional Afghan crafts, but he says his next move is to return to Britain where he wants to understand more about how our society works and attempt, he says, to 'normalise' himself.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Die Forelle by Franz Schubert Book: A parallel text of the Bhagvad Gita Luxury: A ceramic bowl from the village of Istalif in Afghanistan.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2008. My castaway this week is the traveler, author and one-time diplomat Rory Stewart.
0:32.0	He's been nicknamed Lawrence of Belgravia.
0:34.3	Whitty, but only half accurate. Eton, Oxford and the Foreign Office
0:38.6	all point to a terribly privileged old school way of doing things. In reality, his astonishing life has been as far
0:45.3	from convention as is possible. Running wild in the jungles of Malaysia as a boy, walking
0:50.8	alone across Afghanistan in winter after the fall of the Taliban without so much as a map,
0:56.0	and besieged by shelling in the Iraqi province he was supposed to be in charge of.
1:01.0	Snapshots of an existence filled with adventure, danger, high farce, hoary. of this province in post-war Iraq. On that day in May 2004 when your compound
1:15.4	began to be shelled by a man you'd had lunch with only the week before, did you
1:18.8	think that maybe your diplomatic skills had failed you? It was a very worrying situation because I had then about 20 civilian staff in the building.
1:29.0	The Italian quick reaction force, which is the military force, was supposed to be 20 minutes away, and in reality took nearly seven and a half hours to reach us, during which time, about a hundred mortars and rocket-propelled grenades were falling into the compound.
1:43.0	The glass would smash in, people would be dragged in from outside with blood all over them.
1:48.0	Of course, underlying all of this was the irony, as you say, that the man who was leading the attack was a man who was a friend of mine and who I'd had lunch with just previously.
1:57.0	A terrifying situation, how did you manage as the man in charge to at least try to keep everybody calm.
2:04.0	There were a couple of things that I did, which in retrospect seem a little bit fusical.
2:09.0	One of them was to hand out some oat kicks which I'd been saving up in my desk draw. The other was to put on some
2:15.5	music and then to spend quite a lot of time that night and then over the next two nights
2:21.0	because the Siege went on for three days, phoning Baghdad and trying
2:24.9	to call in air support and convince people that we were really in danger.
2:28.5	And during this there was the threat constantly of all communication shutting down. You were losing your links incrementally to the
	...

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