YouSaid · the spoken record

AC Grayling

lines on the record: 46
first: 2008-08-10
most recent: 2008-08-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, I think I would keep the bronze violin concerto because as a musical experience it's one that I could listen to again and again and again and get lost in it would in fact be like a world itself and so my desert island would become something vast.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I know I'm not allowed to take Katie, my wife, which is very sad. So I'm going to have to ask for a very, very good grand piano, and I can get back up to speed with some of the music that I've always loved to play.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm going to be stuck on this desertion for a bit, so I'm going to take Robert Musel's man without qualities. This is a book that really ought to be better known. For one thing, it's huge, it's three volumes, and the third volume is incomplete. Now there's a challenge what one could sit and try and finish it. It's the kind of book that when you're reading it, you find yourself putting down in your knee and wandering off into thought, and that's the mark of a very fine book.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the final piece of music I've chosen Angela Gogu, the Arya from Puccini's Madame Butterfly Unbaldi, that wonderful Arya in the second act, I lived in China for a time and I was also visiting professor at Tokyo University in Japan. This one always makes me cry because it's such a beautiful piece of music, but it also reminds me of some great experiences that I've had living in the far east.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we do talk about these things, obviously. She once said to me when she was much little as she said Am I allowed to believe in fairies? she said. It was rather a face of that one because I said to her it's not a question of what you're allowed to believe. It's a question of what one is entitled to believe if one looks at the evidence and all that kind of thing. But she really did want to believe in fairies while her milk keith was still coming out because of course it's profitable to do so and she's a rational child.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yes, I do because of course children are very natural philosophers, and I can't tell you how healthful and salutary it is to have an eight year old daughter who says, Daddy, that's a very silly idea, and keeps you on the straight and narrow a little bit. You realise that she's seeing some things much more clearly than you are.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's a very much better experience for this reason that your first children, I think, bring you up. So you make all the same mistakes again only much better the second time round. I'm tremendously grateful to my older children for what they did teach me, and I'm sure that my little daughter is going to be very grateful to them for what they did.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I associate this piece of music very much with my father because he was in particular a lover of the piano, and so my earliest musical memories include among them listening to Chopin, waltzes and preludes and nocturnes, and I've chosen here one of Chopin's nocturnes, the E flap major nocturne.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Finally this is the middle of the summer terminal I said I've got pupils and we made our farewells and I jumped on the plane and when I got back to England it was to discover that he had died that night. And I think that happens very often that people do have a sense of when they're ready to go and then they let go.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think he did, and I think this is quite a common thing too. After my sister's mother's death he stayed on in Africa. In fact, he ended up living in the Cape. I got a telephone call one day. I was teaching at Oxford at the time, to say that he was unwell and that they didn't expect him to last more than a couple of days, and I flew out there. My brother who now lives in Australia flew to be with him as well and be turned up. Now the thing about my father was that he had the most beautiful manners. He was a man of infinite courtesy, and the thought of dying while he had visitors just simply would not cross his mind It's no gentleman. So we sat with him for a couple of weeks in the hospital.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'd hope so, I'd hope so, because I think the worst thing that anybody can do is retire really. It's very, very bad for people. People who retire and don't feel that life is very full and they don't feel very useful any longer, sort of give up too soon. And that would be a mistake.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't, and despite being a denizen of the sixties and again with a hairstyle and everything else, I've never taken any of the drugs like potor or cocaine or anything like that really out of fear because what passes for my brain is my instrument. It's always been an anxiety about doing anything to it that blunts it. I don't drink alcohol and I don't take drugs, although I have made myself a promise that if I do reach the age of eighty I am going to take up opium then.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've become a sort of passionate lover of the cello as an instrument, and I've chosen here the first movement of the first cellicon circo by Saint Son, which has some of the elements of what makes the cello such a great concert instrument.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, and you might very well find me standing in a field or on a beach or in a concert or at an exhibition of paintings because they are all spiritual exercises too, or just sitting and having a cup of tea with friends. I mean, I think that's something that can be part of the spiritual life.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean it in a very secular sense, I mean it in the sense of our heart and mind, our emotional and intellectual reactions to things, to the fact that our response to other people and to this world that we occupy has a very, very, very deep basis of sentiment that our need for love, particularly for friendship, and for contact with things that are beautiful and refreshing, are what make us what we are as human beings. I think people connect their own human kind of spirituality to religion because they want some sort of explanation for it, but you don't need it.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, my religion has always been a very sceptical one always, yes. My parents were not at all religious and we lived a very secular kind of life. You know, if you had read Greek mythology, let's say, then you know that Zeus has made lots of mortal maidens pregnant who have given birth to heroes and who go down to Hades and come back again, and the Christian story is a version of that story. And why should it be one that's any more special than the others? And we think of them all anyway as myths. And, you know, it just seems kind of common sensical to me.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. I mean, really, it was. You lost in that, but at the time, I wasn't laughing at the time. No, it was a hypochondriacal attack. It was a very, very hot summer's day. And I started to feel a bit peculiar. And I slumped into a chair. And as I sat there feeling these pins and needles creeping up my arms and legs, and I thought, you know, when they meet in the middle, that would be it. Finally, the doctor did come and tested me. I clutched his white coat as he tried to walk away, saying I can take a doctor. You can tell me how long have I got? He said there's absolutely nothing wrong with you. So it was quite a comic experience in a way, but it was also for a moment or two anyway, a very real one. And in that moment it was like an epiphany in a way, thinking yes, you know, all of one's life, past and future meets here in the present, and that's why you've got to keep that intensity going and not give up.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to choose a piece of music sung by the choir of Maudlin College, Oxford, which is my own old college at Oxford. When I was there, the person in charge of the choir at Mauden was Mankel Bernard Rose, and while he was there he made the choir of Mauden College even better than it had been, and it is one of the great church choirs, and I speak here as a pretty trenchant atheist would suffice people to know that I used to go quite often to Evensong at Maudlin just to listen to this delicious music, and here is the choir of Maudlin College being directed by Bernard Rose.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“but engaging exactly. For me the good life is the life where you're constantly learning, constantly trying to make sense of things, constantly trying to be a good partner, a good citizen in this world of ours in one way or another because it's not really succeeding with something, but it's trying to succeed. And that is the living of the good life.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the essential thing about the good or the welded life is that it should be a life of endeavour. The aim should be to achieve something, to make something”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes I should explain straight away by the way that this rather mealy math expression the good life doesn't in my case and shouldn't in anybody's case I don't think necessarily be a sort of goody two shoes kind of life not in the moralistic no somewhat on the contrary some of my friends when they read the things that I've written about these say you shouldn't call your work about moral values you should say it's about immoral values”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yes, and in fact I have remained so in one response to those difficulties in our family history was to just immerse oneself in work and reading and learning things with the determination really to try to make some kind of progress out of that situation. It's a very productive way of healing, I suppose.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is, yes, in the sense that, you know, we compartmentalize, we divide things up into different subjects of study or ending in oligology, but actually it's just one great thing, which is the attempt to make sense of this world, and to take part in the conversation about it, contributing something to the discussion, hoping not to close it down, but hoping to learn something by engaging in this process.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, as an exercise in trying to understand music, painting, theatre, I did, you know, I tried to write a piano concerta and I tried to write a play and I tried to paint a picture, not really society in the hope of doing anything that would be successful. But in order to have the experience from the inside. But I”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But this is a piece of music which I came to love about this time. I was at this time as an undergraduate becoming even more interested in music and trying to make something of a study of it. And this one is a piece of Beethoven. It's from a symphony that not many people rate really, I suppose they all like the odd numbered symphonies three, five, seven and nine, but this is the fourth symphony and it turns out to be one of the greatest and most beautiful pieces of music that Beethoven, in my opinion, ever produced.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As if that weren't bad enough, the problem was that my mother at that time was not well. She had a heart condition, and a couple of weeks later she had a heart attack, and herself died. And of course this terrible double blow in the family was of course felt by all of us, but my brother and I were tremendously worried about my father, for whom it was the most awful, awful tragedy. And I think that the fact that my brother and I felt a responsibility to try and be as supportive as possible to my father meant that neither he nor I had an opportunity to grieve properly then, and it may be that we've been catching up ever since.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And she met somebody, and within a very short time married him, within a matter of just a couple of months, and it was he who, after they'd been married for about two months, reported that she was missing, and there was a great police search for her and lots of inquiries, and that eventually her body was found, and she had been murdered”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and felt it very acutely she was acutely self conscious, especially of Corsa as a teenager but even earlier. And then our local doctor read a paper in a medical journal about a new technique that had been developed freezing irritant brain cells that caused this motor disability. And so my sister went and she had this brain operation which almost completely cured her. And this in a way was the beginning even of the sort of greater tragedy because liberated from this enslavement to a disability she sort of went mad trying to do what everybody else had done have boyfriends and go to parties and live a sort of wild life but without having had any of the experiences that help you to manage your emotions a bit better and to understand relationships a bit better.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yes, she was my parents' oldest child, and she was born in Luancha. My mother had a tremendously difficult labour, but my sister was of forceps delivery, and the forceps crushed her skull, damaging areas of the brain that control motor function. So although she was completely normal in every other respect, she had a bad motor tremor, her hands shook and her limbs shook, and she couldn't pick up a glass of water easily or a cup of tea or handle a knife and fork and so on. And being completely normal in all other respects meant that she was, you know.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a teenager I played in a band, an extremely bad one, I have to say, and we used to play at parties and gigs and concerts sometimes, but we covered all the beetles and stones and kinks and animals and all that kind of thing, really sixty stuff, and I've still got the hairstyle to prove it. And one of the bands that we liked very much was The Kinks, because Ray Davis of the Kinks is a wonderful writer of pop music. And the song that I've chosen here is not one that we ourselves played because the band had disbanded by the time that this one was produced, but it reminds me very much of those days very evocative of the sixties and those experiences, and it's also, by the way, a song that I say to my wife that I dedicate to her because it's rather apropos.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, it was because of having this rather remote relationship with them that it was possible to observe them. My father was a naturally rather warm person, warm-hearted person, a very likable person, but also a very traditional sort of Edwardian father, I suppose. He was on the horizon, this rather benign presence, but a great distance away. Now obviously my mother was more physically and auditorily present in life, but also rather a disin character herself. She wasn't a warm person or a loving one particularly, and so it wasn't that kind of relationship between me and her, but I understood her even then I didn't resent or pine for or feel the lack of any kind of maternal warmth, because I did get a great deal of warmth from our servants with whom I had a very good close relationship and even indeed today.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm afraid so, I think so. There's a certain temptation to be. And the point I think was this that with my older siblings, my sister and brother, there were difficulties, there were problems about both of them, and my sister was disabled in a way that was central to her story, and my brother was an absolutely wonderful man, but he didn't really enjoy doing exams and so on. And so my mother used to worry about that and pushing him a bit. But so far as I was concerned, she used to say, oh, at least I don't have to worry about you. You're always going to sort yourself out one way or another. And so it was a kind of relief to her.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I did, yeah. I merely was sort of quite distressing and a shocking for a little while, but, you know, when you're that age and you're caught up in busy school life, you pretty soon adjust, and I got plunged into school life, and when they turned up again, it was about six months later, I think, I was quite surprised to see them.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My second piece of music is a little very familiar piece by Schumann, Trameri. I think almost everybody learns this when they're learning the piano. One of the great joys of my early life was music learning music. I started playing the piano about the age of six, and it's a piece I still pay with great enjoyment. It was, I don't know, sort of a high moment in a way to be able to master something, even though it's a very simple piece, really, with such wonderful lyricism.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh straight away I mean it was it was very obvious and it was something that from a pretty early age bothered me I mean on one occasion I saw one of our servants at the end of a long corridor in this great colonial bungalow that we lived in and I ran down the corridor and threw my arms around his neck and my sister was walking along behind me and she said You mustn't do that to servants. You mustn't do that kind of thing and I was about three or four at the time and I remember being very struck and rather troubled by that. Yeah, that was very much part of the picture.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was really brought up by the servants my parents were rather remote figures occupied with what they were doing, and one consequence of this remoteness was that when I went to boarding school at the age of seven and fought because nobody had informed me differently, it was quite comical to think back on it now that my parents would ever come back and collect me. I thought that phase of my life was over and I wouldn't be seeing them again, and I suppose there was an early experience. I didn't assume that that would be the case.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, she was short, she said about five foot tall, so she always had this rather buffon hairstyle, you see, to give a few extra inches, and very, very high heels which he wore even first thing on a Sunday morning, and a terrifying mien, I think. I say all these things about her because as the youngest child by some years after my older siblings, I was always kind of an observer of this and a slightly amused one of her interactions with the rest of the family, where there was a certain amount of sparks flying and thunder rolling, and she and I understood one another well enough for that not to be the case with our relationship.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yes, very much so, yes. She was a difficult character, a rather neurotic, nervous, very feisty, very dominant character in the household environment, and it's hard to imagine quite how she would have managed with the realities of being back here because there certainly wouldn't have been troops of servants to look after”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My father loved Africa, he was passionate about it, he was a great outdoors type and in fact was involved with the setting up of one of the great national parks in Zambia, the Kiffu National Park.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When it was very comfortable of course'cause it was all laid on by the bank, and it was one reason why my mother, who absolutely hated Africa, didn't like it at all, but stuck with it because it was a jolly comfortable life lots of servants and very easy time, nothing to do but bridge and reading novels, and I suspect, you know, not necessarily of my parents, but at any rate among the expat community, adultery, you know, these were the entertainments.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well he was, yes,'cause I think the head office in London expected all its officials out in the tropics to die after a few years, and so they had these immensely generous terms of service. So my parents travelled a very great deal as a result, popping us into boarding schools here and there.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first piece of music I've chosen is the Adagio from Brahm's violin concerto. Now this will be a tiny little bit controversial, especially among those friends of mine who know more about music than I do, and who say, Oh, this is the perfect rottenness of the high romantic period of music. But this is such a beautiful piece of music, and it seems to me to collect up and embrace so many of the things that are very best about the possibility of our human response to the world. And I think this violin concerto expresses it all.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I do I keep saying to people in lectures and things that if you think about it, the average human lifespan is less than a thousand months long. If you do the maths, you know twelve times seventy two. In fact, it's in the early eight hundreds of months. And that means that you've got to focus on what really matters and then go after that. And then, of course, the pursuit itself is the thing that generates this rich, deep kind of satisfaction that makes for a truly good life.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To some extent, yes, and that's a pity in a way, because right from the very earliest days, right indeed from the time of Socrates and Plato, philosophy was something that all educated and thoughtful people engaged in, precisely because it addresses the questions about the good life and the good society, and everything that presses, everything that concerns people about how to live, what sort of people they should be, is there in philosophy and more. So it should be a common possession.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'd come across references to these great names Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and I came across the collected dialogues of Plato in a little local library, a very eccentric little library which I think some past British colonial servant had left behind him. The very, very first volume contained all the early, very accessible, very simple dialogues of Plato, and by the greatest good luck I picked one of those and started to read it. In fact, it was a dialogue called the Carmedes, and it struck me like a hammer blow between the eyes really, that here was this great name, Socrates, devoting himself to questions about the good, about beauty, about justice, about truth, about all those stirring ideas, and I think I was hooked from then on.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, another way of putting the point is to say that you're given license by philosophy to stick your nose into everybody's business and try and find out what they're up to, why they're doing it, why it matters. And that's the exhilarating thing about it.”
2008-08-10 · Desert Island Discs · AC Grayling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source