Books for a Desert Island

FOR MANY YEARS PAST Roy Plomley has persuaded all kinds of people, celebrities every one, but not all of them just transient showbiz personalities hurtling like meteors across the firmament, to enter one of the BBC's studios and there, to the strains of Eric Coates's Blue Lagoon and the cries of sea‐birds, to confide into the microphone the gramophone records they would choose to have with them if they were marooned on a desert island. Week in, week out, listeners have been rewarded with snippets of autobiography, a little amateur philosophy, and sometimes a dabble or two in psychology, accompanied at suitable intervals by a record highspotting significant (or even insignificant) events in the prospective castaway's life. Now I would agree that music is without question the most evocative of the arts, but I would make a strong plea for literature to be regarded as a close second. Why not ‘Desert Island Bookshelf’? After all, the most famous of shipwrecked mariners, Robinson Crusoe, had the benefit of a not inconsiderable library on his island: no fewer than three Bibles, a few Popish prayer‐books, a few books of navigation, some books in Portuguese, and a number of others unspecified. Of course, there would be an odds‐on chance of hearing the latest over‐developed, over‐peroxided Hollywood starlet assure Mr Plomley that of all the Greek classics the one she read most often was little old Plato's Republic. But then every silver lining has a grey cloud attached to it somewhere or other.