Hello I'm Krestey 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 1996 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a writer, a clever North London boy he graduated from Oxford to the review pages of the upmarket press,

where his views on the latest books and the latest television programs earned him a reputation as a clever writer.

By the time he was 34 he published his first novel

Metroland which won him his first literary prize. Since then he's written another

eight and won three more, most famously perhaps for Flaubert's parrot, a mixture of

biography, criticism and fiction that links its author to his lover France and its

culture. Widely admired here in Britain and abroad, he's been translated into 30 languages,

he nevertheless remains somewhat enigmatic.

The writer makes the rules about what you talk about, says he is Julian Barnes do I take it from

that you just don't like being interviewed it depends on the interviewer

somebody described it as trying to get blood from a turnip.

Yes, I have my turnip moments, it's true.

Have you very firm and proper professional reasons to justify not liking being interviewed?

Is it simply that you find it an uncomfortable experience?

I find it vaguely uncomfortable. There's a sort of presumption of intimacy which is false.

The other thing is that if you're a writer, you're often asked

questions about your books which invite you to simplify your books. The question that you're

often asked is,

what were you trying to say in such and such a novel,

to which the answer is,

...