Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For Wright's reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1981, and the presenter was Roy Plumlee. On our Desert Island this week is the writer John Fowles. Mr Fowles, how well could you endure loneliness?

I think fairly well. First of all all novelist slimes are extremely lonely. I in particular have always liked solitude.

And many years ago I seriously contemplated writing a new version of Robinson Crusoe in which the castaway would his

great worry would not be getting off the island but staying on the island not being

discovered.

How important is music in your life?

Well, I perform very badly on a recorder.

This for rather peculiar reasons.

I find when I'm writing that to break off and play a little music is very relaxing and I'm also very fond of Elizabethan music and

so I break off every so often when I'm working very hard and play music for half an hour.

Do you ever play a record while you're working?

I don't anymore. Pure music's all right, but I find anything with voice in is distracting. I used to play bark a lot. I found bark. But then I began to feel that this was a terrible abuse of the man whom to my mind is the greatest composer and I don't do it now

if I play bark now it's to listen to him. Do you collect record in a mild sort of way?

Yes. What's the first one you've chosen for your solitude?

Well, I'd like to choose a flamenco record,

partly because all my generation had to wait a long time before they went abroad because we were

in our teens during the Second World War and abroad hit us I think in a way that perhaps modern young people can hardly imagine.

And I first went to France and Spain when I was quite well into my 20s and I can remember

the excitement of hearing sort of folk music

play it for the first time and I remember going to enter this year and hearing

...