Hello, I'm Kesti 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 1998 and the presenter was Sue Lolli.

My cast away this week is a writer. She was 42 before her first book was published.

Before that she'd led a life that sounds rather like the plot of a novel itself.

Her German nobleman father had died when she was nine.

She went to live with her beautiful mother in Italy in the south of France,

where in a whirl of artistic unorthodoxy she became friends with Aldous Huxley and Thomas Mann

and mingled with the likes of Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf.

Her first novel, A Legacy, published in 1953, was much praised by Evelyn War.

Her fourth jigsaw was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989.

In between she wrote about travel, food and wine and published accounts of famous trials.

She believes that the seeds of our downfall are within us.

We all ruin our own lives, she says. She is Sibyl Bedford.

So, character is destiny, is it Sibyl? There's a sort of inevitability about that.

I think if we drew to find it inevitable.

I think one can try to fight it, to make oneself better.

Depends of course on chance, who one meets, what happens to one, how one deals with experience.

Of course you met so many people who had an enormous influence on one life.

Not least Aldous Huxley, who of course, I think you've said that was the most important turning point in your life, wasn't it?

It was because he was not only one of the most remarkable men we ever lived with and he was a man who was good through and through.

I mean apart from his enormous intellectual abilities.

But he had this good will, the most important thing.

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