YouSaid · the spoken record

John Sutherland

lines on the record: 50
first: 2006-01-22
most recent: 2006-01-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, I don't know whether it is eligible, but I think the sixty gigabyte iPod, which would give me fourteen thousand nine hundred ninety two other tracks, but if I could be marooned next year, I'll take the hundred and twenty megabyte iPod, which I'm sure is coming down the track”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would really like to say the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, but I can't do that, no, obviously. In that case, I take Vanity Fair, which I think is the greatest novel in the English language. Yes, I more fun than Middle March and you don't feel lectured in the same way that you do with George Elliot.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been very lucky in all my kind of professional life I've been spent with young people and I do admire the kind of just the smartness really and the way in which culturally and in terms of their kind of their tastes nowadays they are so much further ahead than I was at their age with my little Earl Bostick stuff. And the last track is Franz Ferdinand and Take Me Out. It's a very enigmatic sort of very enigmatic lyric that it has but the music is wonderful and this is music created by young people for young people and it is I find incredibly hopeful for the future when I listen to this kind of thing.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We earn and after we fabricate and we sort of falsify, but at the same time I think it's quite important if you've lived to know that you've lived and to know exactly what's happened and how it happened and put things in shape and as I say in order and so it would be to some extent I suppose a kind of writing cure as the Freudians might say.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think probably, yes, I'm quite interested in Joz Rondo at certain stages of life one does become very introverted. And I think it's really that you want to put things in order. You want to find out what it was all about.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think I've done a serve my time, so to speak. It's a question of my mind whether I really regret it or not. I spoke to a lot of alcoholics about this. Quite a few of them actually say, well, if they had their time again, they're not sure they wouldn't go through it on the grounds that they feel that, to use that rather kind of tired phrase, it was a kind of learning process. I'm not sure I would quite like to suffer all that pain and humiliation again, but certainly, I mean, one does. and perhaps even probably a better person I'd hope.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next record is one I'm fond of Oscar Peterson playing tenderly. Sometimes music can actually just sort of just make you feel terrific and this has always had that effect on me.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It wasn't. In fact, she said I was briefly a colleague of mine. But yes, I mean, that kind of mischievousness, I think, was in the air, and there was a lot of it about. And to some extent, it is fun sometimes to puncture the, as it were, the seriousness of scholarship. And literary scholarship has got incredibly serious in the last three or four decades.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think he probably is, yes, though we like him so much that we forgive him. He's one of those murderers that we let off the hook. I did that really because I didn't have time to work in libraries anymore. The period in your life when you had to live off your kind of accumulated capital and I didn't have time to spend week after week in libraries because I had administrative responsibilities for the first time.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I left California and came back to the Lord Northcope Professor Modern English Literature at University College London. As Frank Cermode, my predecessor there, said Lord Northcliffe, professor of modern English like being the Mammon Professor of God. But it was a job that meant a lot to me because I love University College London, which in fact is the oldest English department in the country, and has this tradition of mixing higher journalism and high scholarship. And it has always seemed to me to be very open to new ideas and initiatives and really fun to be in. You're fun to teach and attracted interesting students as well.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I vaguely remember because it was a period which is still a bit foggy and lots of kind of empty bottles and sort of rather kind of painful hangover mornings but I think it must have been January 1983 and I was very lucky that my family, my wife and my son stood by me. They had every reason not to be very beastly as terminal alcoholics are but they gave me the second chance I'd be eternally grateful for that As I said, I got sober in California, and California had always existed for me. I've been watching movies ever since I was a conscious child, and I'd always had this vision of California, the places where I suppose a kind of an Elysium. I did love it. And the next track is, it's rather corny, it's the Eagles and Hotel California. I like that line you could check out, but you could never leave.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't drink, and I haven't drunk for twenty three years, and I don't even think about drinking nowadays. So, yeah, I think probably. But it depends on the person. There are no rules here. I'm just very glad. I'm very grateful to you. I'm very glad that I don't drink. I hope I never do again.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some do and some don't. So in fact, if you are the kind of person that needs that kind of sort of shelter, then in fact it will offer it.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As I said earlier, I always found it very easy to take orders and sort of to follow instructions and be good. I mean, alcoholics Anonymous sets up this kind of apparatus. It is in fact an institution. I'm not an active participant now. As I said, I needed that lifebelt, but I don't want to go through the rest of my life with a lifebelt around my waist.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It did, yeah. I got very squalid, very sordid. These are kind of memories which can still sort of groan when I remember them. And I suppose there'll always be grooved or etched into me. I started going to Alcoholics Anonymous, which is an American invention, really, a very good one, in which it starts from the premise that only alcoholics can help alcoholics. It works for some people. It certainly worked for me, and I think it works for many others as well, at least I hope it does.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oddly enough it is exactly like that. I mean, you sort of go as low as you can, and either you stay there or come back up. But it's when I went to California, and I went out there, and I still drinking heavily, and what I discovered in California was that America, of course, has a land of opportunity, but there are no safety nets. And if you start dropping, then you just keep dropping until you hit something very hard.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is in fact overwhelmingly so. You can argue that to some extent it's out of control over ten thousand novels published last year. There is so much quality now. In fact, life is really too short, but it is a wonderful time to be alive. The fifth record, I'm afraid, is, as they say, in sort of in AA, my name is John and I'm an alcoholic. This, in fact, is a wonderful sort of anthem to alcoholism. It's Tom Waits and the piano has been drinking. Of course, every alcoholic blames everything except himself for the fact that he's drunk.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it wasn't, and you are cheek by jolly sort of university colleges earlier, a stone throw from where we're sitting at the moment in broadcasting house. So to some extent it seemed to be foolish, as it were, to go into the ivory tower when there was so much just around the ivory towers.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes. I mean, this is a kind of feature of the career alcoholic that for about 20 years, sometimes longer, they can hold their drink, is the phrase which is used. And at the same time, it'd be quite high performing. Certainly I could keep it all together. But in fact, there was too much of it and a cost is paid, and then gradually, of course, as your tolerance builds up, you tend to drink more and more, and the drink becomes more central. And certainly a lot of my friends of that era have succumbed fatally to alcoholism. It is, in fact, a dreadful thing.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was a cult of what one might call heroic over indulgence. But it was also very companionable. People always to some extent sort of forget the good side of drinking, which makes people sociable. It's a lot of fun. Looking back, I feel there was a lot of liberation as well that came along with this kind of what would now be called partying, I suppose. That's to say, I tended to drink in Scotland with colleagues, very learned, in some cases, very eminent people. So it wasn't all bad. I mean, it wasn't all sort of lying in the gutter of my own vomit.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is a moment of truth in your life when you're given what you want. And the challenge, well, okay, do it then. And that decade for me was in fact very productive and very happy, but it seems to me happiness means different things at different times of your life and is defined differently at different times of your life. I know I had real sophisticated taste of music, though in fact modern jazz always seemed to me to be somehow classy in a way, and I was terribly culturally snobbish about it, but this next record which is Dave Rubick and his quartet playing the way you look tonight, that for me was the acne of sophistication.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. I was very lucky. I had this job in California, which effectively was a sign of cure. I had 10 years, the most beautiful, idyllic library in the world, the Huntington. One of my colleagues said if I died and went to heaven it would be like the Huntington Library. But is that?”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I recommend eight thousand for the which I think I'm going to stop at that actually. I still read one or two but now I reread the ones I like best.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By my estimate, about 70,000, but it's a rather fuzzy sort of area at the borders, and no one really knows. In fact, one will never know it. You can just scrape the surface of it. In fact, when courses on Victorian fixture offered us about five novels, which is a bit like having a brick and talking about architecture.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've read a biography of Once Scott and did my PhD on Thacker written several books on Thackeray, in fact, and edited most of his major novels. But the fact that she, in fact, took an interest in me was immensely influential. A lot of her attitudes, I just took over wholesale except the not publishing, I couldn't see the point of not actually talking to people. I like to be admired.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She's a remarkable woman, in fact I think she was the stuffing inside Philip Larkin really a lot of things which he's famous for not travelling because of the dust and not being able to publish because poetry had given up him. In fact, I think they were derived from her. She believed very strongly that in this day and age in universities it was more distinguished not to publish than to publish, and she had very, very pronounced views on writers she liked, she liked the perk crab, she liked the novelist Scott, and she was a bit crazy about William Makepeace Thackeray, an enthusiasm which she passed on to me.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I read voraciously of the child and a lot of Victorian fiction came my way, and then I went to Leicester. I was very lucky because at Leicester I came out of the wing of Monica Jones, who's very well known now as the consort of Philip Larkin. What was she like?”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, 234789019, population of Tokyo as they used to say it was right. They used to work out your status by the kind of brevity of your nomaria. In fact, it was the end of the line, yes. Lequra number three, in fact, is I was in the Suffolk Regiment known throughout the British Army as sometimes the silly Suffolk and sometimes the Suffolk Swedes. They have much respect. They had a lot of very impressive battle on us. But they also had what, in fact, was the least sort of convenient quick march song in the British Army called Speed the Plough, which as soon as it was played, everyone's feet started falling over. It was very, very hard to actually sort of march to it. But I have a certain affection for speed the plough.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to go her nowhere else to go, so in fact I went in and it was rather a nice time because national service was winding down, there were no interesting wars going on, but there was still Cyprus, there was still a bit of internal security stuff going on.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was the end of national service to be honest if you went in with a kind of hiccup they would actually sort of give you a deferment or in fact sort of turn you away because they didn't really want anymore of these kind of awful kind of conscripts, terrible soldiers.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She came back, and we actually had a rather happy life, actually, because she came back and we set up home together, went our separate ways, I would come back and find a ten shilling note on the table. Sometimes our paths were crossed, but from that point of view it was a fairly ideal family for someone in my situation.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, that's right. Of course, these were the days when you could go into a chemist and say that your sister was dieting and could they give you some amphetamines and prejudice? It was kind of like the 1920s, I suppose, when prohibition was lifted. Adolescence was very different. Then it went on much longer and was much more tormented. I mean, kids, it seems to me now, just seem to grow up. I mean, they're wearing designer clothes at nine, and they're adults at the age of 15. So it was a longer and in some ways much more kind of, I think, fraught period for me.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I never understood school one knows oneself after many years I find it very hard sometimes to get into subjects to leave the starting blocks and as a result of which my school education was respectable but I couldn't get a university place”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always felt very safe in institutions, that's to say I felt that a kind of shelter over me, and to some extent it makes one into a company man, and yet there's another part of me, of course, like all company men who is also the kind of the rebel bit of a bristo about me, I think, in some ways.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Indeed, yes, that's right, which parts of which would return on Monday lunch and Tuesday lunch if one was unlucky on Wednesday.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Record number two is very hard now to imagine how limited one's access to media was in the forties and fifties, and how important the BBC was, which then of course was a monopoly. The record I've chosen, which is a foggy, foggy due, which was quite often played on things like family favourites or housewives choice, was very naughty. It's about illegitimacy. It's about sort of sex. And somehow, I don't know how it became a kind of quite often heard record on the BBC, though it had a kind of impropriety, which I found at the time really charmingly daring.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I mean, unless you have inequalities, which I don't think I did have, it leads to crippling shyness, which I certainly had. And drinking was one way in which I managed to, as it were, treat that shyness very successfully, I must say.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I felt in the wail that all the time I was an only child, and adults to some extent can't incorporate young children into their social lives. So I did feel at times that I was, as it were, sort of. A hindrance. And I was, of course.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Strangers, even. Well, I suppose anthropologists would call an extended family. It wasn't a bad childhood, actually, as I treated very well. No one beat me, no one deprived me. I was never put in the cold hole or sent.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, she went. One of the difficult things that children often have to come to terms with is the fact that they're usually in the way and encumbrances unless parents devote their whole lives to them, they can be difficult burdens. And my mother actually had her own life to live and she went away to Argentina. It must be very exciting for her, less exciting for me because I was with a number of relatives. I treated very well, I have to say.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My mother was in service originally, but she was a very enterprising woman. She ran away from home and ran to London, where I think she, in fact, was in service. My grandmother once said rather proudly that she had a daughter at Bedford College, but the fact that that daughter was cleaning the rooms at Bedford College, and she met my father, who I think actually sort of, he'd matriculated, but couldn't get to university because of financial reasons. She had a scholarship to go to a blue coat school in Colchester, but her parents couldn't or weren't inclined to pay for the blue coats the uniform.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was a policeman. He was one of these displaced Scots who came down, I think he was a very intelligent man, also a rather large physical man. And he came down to the”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was in Bomacommand and he was killed in training. I made a lot of friends in Germany after the war and I saw the devastation visited on German cities and I was rather glad that he hadn't been part of the conflict which I have very mixed views about.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I got a couple of snapshots of him somewhere in one of my kind of deepest buried mental albums, but the fact is I never knew him, except by the kind of legends and family reminiscences that one clings on to and builds an image.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first record I've chosen because it was the first record I ever owned, I think, which meant anything to me as Earl Bostick's Flamingo. I can remember the wonderful effect that the opening sort of call of this saxophone in pain had on me when I first brought the record. But at the time it represented me a world which was so far away from myself, you know, like the city on the hill, where in fact there were kind of saxophonists, black saxophonists, serenading flamingos.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It does seem to me that in the educational establishment there is a kind of prejudice against the new. It seems to me that the thing about texting is a whole generation of young people have taught themselves shorthand. Not only do they write shorthand, they can communicate, and they have their own styles of writing. Now, it seems to me that whether or not you can see how that fits in, you should to some extent be open to the possibility that it might”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You say that, but I remember I took the eleven pluses it was then called, and I remember sitting next to a child and the invigilator came along and took one look at what he was doing and said you realise if you use that pen you'll probably fail this examination and the pen was a biro as it was called a ballpoint pen and there was a terrific down on them because it was thought that they as it were they made writing too easy”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I suppose my childhood was shaken up by the war, I said, at least my circumstances were. My father was killed, my mother really had to go out and make her own way in the world. As a result of it, I'd left alone a lot, and I think it's what they called a good child, one of those who've seen and not heard, because I found it quite convenient to put my nose in a book.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was grossly unfair and very wasteful. It was grossly unfair because in my catchment area it took one child out of five and gave them a privilege. In that sense it was just too straight a gate. On the other hand, it was a gate that was open, and so one could get through it.”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was very lucky, obviously I know cleverer than my antecedents. It just a happen I was born at a time when the opportunities were there. And also I think it's all the unremembered, often unremembered acts of assistance and kindness and interest, actually, is people taking interest in you. And of course for me the big social event which I think in fact was a liberation not just for me but for my generation was the Second World War, which for one thing shook up the British class system, I think it's now actually sort of settled back in something like its old sort of shape. But for those years and the years afterwards there was much more social mobility and of course the great sort of political intervention was the 1944 Education Act which”
2006-01-22 · Desert Island Discs · John Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source