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 1992,

and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a historian, a distinguished author and now chairman of the

board of the National Theatre. It is however her family which she considers as

most important to her. My whole life she says has been as a daughter and a

mother and a wife. This is not such a limiting ambition as it might sound. Her

father was the greatest British Prime Minister of the 20th century, her husband and

eminent politician and diplomat, and her eldest son is a member of Parliament.

She herself is the youngest and only surviving child of Winston Churchill. She is Mary Soames. You've said on

several occasions, Lady Soames, that you feel like the last of the Mohicans.

Do questions go on coming into you about your father?

Yes, it's very moving and also very interesting that I get many many letters during the course of the year from people of all ages and from many different countries

wanting to know various things about my father,

some of them sending me poems that he has evoked, some of

them just wanting to say how much they've admired him, and I find this deeply moving.

But what sort of questions did they ask?

One would have thought all the questions would have been answered by now.

Yes.

Well, some of them of course want to know how many cigars he smoked every day, and I'm not a very good informant, really, because I sort of never went around counting.

But you can correct wrong assumptions, and I know that you were rather critical of the recent

biography of your father on television when it was suggested that his so-called black dog,

...