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

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Radio 4. My cast away this

away this My castaway this week is the historian Gardner and diarist Sir Roy Strong.

He stormed the establishment in the

60s a proto meritocrat in possession of a sharp intellect fizzing ambition and a brown velvet frock coat

An avowedly unhappy and clever child he had first turned to history and art for stimulation and solace and of the National Portrait Gallery and later to run the vene. But such early success

left him with a fundamental problem. Having fulfilled his wildest dreams by the age of

38, what was he to do with the rest of his life?

Listener, he has not been idle.

He says, looking back, the whole of my life has been fleeing my family, struggling to detach

myself, get as far away as possible and make a life and a home

full of the old-fashioned virtues I was never surrounded by as a child.

So Sir Roy Strong, have you succeeded, I wonder, in that ambition?

Yes, I think I have.

I certainly succeeded in making a life and a surrounding of my own.

I think in the way that's rather harsh to say one fleed from one's family, but to an extent

at that stage one did.

It gave one the drive and one saw a vision of a different world, a world of art and design

and history and glamour and romance and all sorts of other things. And one had to somehow... and

and one had to somehow get out of what was.

...