LRB Castaways

As Miranda Carter writes in the current issue of the LRB, more than 2360 episodes of Desert Island Discs are available as podcasts. ‘This audio archive is unique,’ Carter says. ‘Before your ears thousands of famous and no longer famous people talk about themselves. Over seventy years, the language with which we describe ourselves, and expectations about what it’s acceptable to reveal in the public realm, are audibly mapped.’

Some of the programme’s guests have also contributed to the London Review of Books. They include, in chronological order: Stephen Spender (1962 and 1989), Alan Bennett (1967, sadly not available, though you can see what his records, book and luxury would have been), Anthony Powell (1976), Paul Theroux (1976), Patricia Highsmith (1979), Clive James (1980 and 2000), A.J. Ayer (1984), Germaine Greer (1988), Salman Rushdie (1988), Mary Warnock (1988), Seamus Heaney (1990), E.P. Thompson (1991), Oliver Sacks (1994), Eric Hobsbawm (1995), George Steiner (1996), Gordon Brown (1996), Julian Barnes (1996), Frank Kermode (1997), Stephen Frears (2004), Betsy Blair (2005), Mary Midgley (2005), Tariq Ali (2008), Mary Beard (2010), Ahdaf Soueif (2012), Colm Tóibín (2016) and Anne Enright (2020).