Hello, I'm Kirstie 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 Lolley.

My cast away this week is an intellectual and philosopher. He was born in Latvia 82 years ago,

but his family moved to St Petersburg and then to England, arriving here when he was 10 years old.

He himself does not believe that his traditional British education, St Paul's school London

and Corpus Christi Oxford, gave any hint of the distinguished career that was to come.

Nevertheless, he's now regarded as one of the most brilliant scholars of his age, a man whose

enormous learning has made him an analytical master of the swirling ideas of this century.

During the last war, Winston Churchill, it said, delighted in his dispatches from Washington

and Moscow. Today, scholars all over the world continue to enjoy the benefits of his wisdom.

He is Sir Isaiah Berlin. You're an intellectual and a philosopher. I suppose it's too much to ask

that you're a practical man as well and could exist on our Desert Island. I doubt if I could

survive. I'm not very practical. I don't know what I could do in Desert Island. I couldn't

build a boat. I wouldn't know what we eat, so I didn't know which routes I could eat or which

barriers of poisonous. I didn't think I could catch fish with my bare hands.

So you're not going to have a very easy time on the island. Would you panic, do you think?

No, I wouldn't panic, because I don't think I'm very panicable by nature, but I'd be very gloomy,

because I don't like extended solitude. But as a man whose life's work has been philosophy and

ideas, would you be able to avoid loneliness? Would you be able to keep yourself company

by going inside your own head? I don't think so. The thought of simply being

sunk in thought for hours and hours and hours is not what I do. I only think I think when I read

...