I'm Rory Stewart and I grew up wanting to be a hero and I'm still fascinated by the ideas of heroism.

In my new series, I'm taking in the long sweep of history from Achilles to Zelensky and asking, what is a hero?

Simply doing your job, being a decent human being.

A true hero is someone who just kind of shines by

their own light and that light is to be recognised by others. The long history of heroism with me,

Rory Stewart. Listen on BBC Sounds. Hello, I'm Krista 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 1983,

and the presenter was Roy Plumley. Music This week, our cast away is the Australian novelist Thomas Caneli, who was winner last year of the Booker Prize with Schindler's Ark.

Now, Tom, we're going to send you to a very small island, a deserted one,

with a small parcel of eight records. Is music an interest of yours?

Yes, it is an interest, but I have a very inchoate taste, very unrefined taste,

so I should warn people now at this stage.

People have been warned.

Do you make music yourself? Do you play an instrument?

No, but I do sing and have always sung with a particular passion for singing folk songs,

generally in remote settings, because other members of the race don't

seem to show much tolerance. Now, did you find it a very difficult job to choose just eight

records to last for a long, long time? Well, of course it is an enormously difficult job. I think that if you were on a desert island and you had chosen eight records,

after a year and a half, you would start to curse your earlier choice

and think of many others that you could have made.

...