Robert McCrum

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 5 March 2000

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sue Lawley's guest this week is Robert McCrum. The author of six highly acclaimed novels and literary editor of the Observer, he describes how he woke up one morning, at the age of 42, to a raging headache and partial paralysis. He had suffered a stroke and it was to take him more than a year to recover. Later, he was to write a memoir about that process which became not only a guide to other sufferers, but also a love story dedicated to his wife.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Prelude - Cello Suite No 3 by Johann Sebastian Bach Book: Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome Luxury: St John's Wort

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in the year 2000, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a publisher and author, brought up in exalted academic circles.
0:36.8	His father was headmaster of Eaton and later master of Corpus Christi Cambridge.
0:41.2	He performed as expected and got a first-class degree. Talent continued
0:45.8	to accompany him. He clearly understood other peoples. As a publisher, he signed up authors
0:50.4	such as Peter Carey, Garrison Kila and Milan Kundra and demonstrated his own writing
0:56.0	successful thrillers such as In a Secret State and making an ambitious BBC documentary series
1:01.6	The Story of English. Then five years ago at the age of
1:05.4	42 he suffered a major stroke. His next book was very different from the ones that
1:11.0	went before. Called my year off, he told the story of his journey back to ordinary life
1:16.6	from the paralyzing crisis which changed him and his world forever.
1:21.0	I'm improved, he says much but improved he is Robert
1:25.5	McCrum what does that mean Robert that you're a nicer person than you used to be I
1:30.0	think I'm more tolerant I hope so I think I'm more tolerant. I hope so. I think I was unaware really of
1:35.8	the disadvantage before, certainly in physical terms.
1:39.4	And I think that I was living life at such a pace that was missing out on all kinds of nuances.
1:46.0	I think that the effect of being very seriously ill tuned me into the world of pain.
1:52.0	The perceived view of you is of course that you were
1:55.9	leading this charmed life that you were one of the brightest stars in
1:59.2	in literary London and then suddenly you were cut down. Were you really as dismissive and
2:06.2	arrogant as they said you were before? I think that's to do with the fact that I got
	...

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