Philip Pullman is the author of the celebrated His Dark Materials trilogy: Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. He was born in Norwich and spent his early years travelling all over the world with his father, who was in the RAF, and his mother and brother. Whilst in Australia he devoured comic book stories, which made a big contrast to the traditional stories his clergyman grandfather would tell him on return trips to Norwich. Philip planned to be a writer from the age of six and, when the family moved to Wales when he was 11, he developed a real passion for stories, encouraged by a school teacher to read more and write them down. Philip went to study English at Oxford, although he says it was really after he finished his degree that he started to learn. He began his first novel the day he left and although he says "it was terrible" he didn't give up. He worked in a variety of jobs to enable him to write and eventually went into teaching. He developed his writing style further by writing school plays and dealing with the challenge of making them accessible to both the children and the parents: it was an ideal training ground.
Philip has since written many books for children: Clockwork, I was a Rat! (which was dramatised for BBC television), and The Firework-Maker's Daughter, which won the Smarties Gold Award in 1996 and the Sally Lockhart Award. The His Dark Materials trilogy has become a huge success with children and adults, and, on 22nd January 2002, Philip won the Whitbread Prize for the third book in the trilogy, The Amber Spyglass. This was the first time that a children's book had won either the Booker or the Whitbread.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Sonata Reminiscenza in A Minor by Nickolay Medtner Book: A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust Luxury: A Jar of Apricots, by Chardin
This is an unofficial transcript meant for reference. Accuracy is not guaranteed.
Hello, I'm Kirsty Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in 2002 and the presenter was Sue Lawley.
Next week is a writer. From the seclusion of his garden shed in Oxford, he's poured out stories to delight the world. His main audience has been children, but people of all ages and nations are now attracted by his work. He made his...
Reputation with his books about Sally Lockhart, an unmarried mother and sleuth in Dickensian London. But it's his trilogy, His Darkest
Materials which has put him top of his profession. Witches, airborne jellyfish, gay angels and armoured bears are some of the creatures which inhabit these prize-winning books.
By critics and millions of readers but described by the Catholic Herald as worthy of the bonfire.
After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world, he says, and I am always the servant of the story that's chosen me to tell it. He is Philip Pullman. We'll come to the church's argument with you later on, Philip.
But tell me about being chosen by the story. It sounds rather mystical. You're not the first author to say it. How does it work for you?
It does sound rather if not mystical and somehow platonic as if the stories inhabit a different realm and they come to me I don't really believe that but it certainly feels like that It feels as if a story comes to me and and says tell me this is this is your job This is what you've got to do, but how does it come?
of plonk down in front of you and say... No, what happens is something snags your mind and you think, Oh, there's a story there. What can I do about that? And then little by little it sort of emerges out of the fog...
Of unknowing. So the talent is in the recognition is it? Because I mean there must be lots of bits and pieces you might that might happen past you any day
I think that everybody has these things all the time, but only people who write professionally sort of make a habit of noticing them. The commonest question writers get asked and you must have
this numerous times. Where do you get your ideas from? Well, the ideas aren't the problem. They come up all the time. The trick is to recognize what is likely to be a good story if you keep fiddling with it and putting bits onto it and seeing if they fall off or not.
Well, the idea for my story, I was a rat, for example. I can't remember what it was, but the idea of...
Hearing a knock on the door and opening it and finding a child there who needs to be looked after. That was the starting point.
And somehow the idea of rats was associated with this. I don't know why, you know, there was a sort of cloudiness about it, a sort of oddness.
There were rats in the feelings somewhere. And this is what you have to recognise, and not turn the lights on too sharply. You sort of shine a floodlight all around to see where did that rat idea come from, what did that mean, what is it? Then you'll chase it away and it won't come back. You don't even want to put it down in words yet because that fixes it. Is that a pleasure or a chore? Do you sit there?
They're thinking, When is this thing going to explain itself to me? It's both a pleasure and a chore. It's a pleasure because when it comes right, there's no pleasure like it. It's a chore because a lot of the time it doesn't come right. You can't only write when you're feeling inspired, or you only write on two or three days a year. You have to, a lot of the time you have to sit there and...
Make it up out of stuff that isn't very clear. So it's both a pleasure and a chore. And you sit there every day doing the same amount, don't you? I've found over the years that it's a good way for me to write, is to write three pages in manuscript every day. So that's what I do. It's about 1,000 words. Not a lot. Well, it can take quite a lot of time.
...pass very quickly. In other days I'm still late into the evening. But every day when a book is on stream, I do my three pages.
It mounts up, that's the point. Tell me about your first record. This is a very pretty piece. I'm a great fan of pretty things, prettiness. And this is pretty music. There's a lot of French piano music which is very pretty, but this is the prettiest of all I think.
- From Debussy's La Petite Suite played by Michel Beroff and Jean-Philippe Collard. Your trilogy, Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials has...
In the world.
It's the story of children pitting themselves against the forces of evil in our own and other parallel universes against some of those fantastic creatures I mentioned in the introduction.
But you say, nevertheless, although it is fantasy, you say you're a realist. I don't understand that.
Yes, well I say these things to provoke, really, and to provoke and annoy.
Now what I meant by that really is that I'm trying to be psychologically realistic. The problem with some fantasy, not all fantasy, but some fantasy is that it doesn't seem to be very interested in human psychology, in what it is that makes us feel human, what it's like to grow up, the things that interest me. I wanted to use fantasy as a way of talking about this, as a way of saying some things
not new but saying something in a new way. You should explain that your hero and heroine, well the heroine really is Lyra isn't she and she is a young girl and she meets a young boy.
Called Will, but in the end they can't be together because they come from separate worlds, from parallel universes, and to be together one of them would have to die because they can't survive forever in their separate universes. And that is why you have to...
Agree with yourself that heaven is here and now and you can't long for the next thing. That was a way of bringing it home to the reader, yes. The importance of understanding that heaven, if it exists at all, can only exist in the world we live in.
There ain't no elsewhere. You can't have been surprised when you upset the church, therefore, because it is anti-church. The church in the book is called the authority with a capital 'A'.
Yeah, well, every... And it's a pretty malevolent force, isn't it? Well, churches are malevolent forces in our world and have been. If we look at the history of the Christian church alone, we see persecutions, hangings, burnings, tortures carried out in the name of the God of love.
Of infamy almost without parallel. We don't have to look very far in the world today to see examples of zealotry entirely fueled and sustained by religious hatreds of the world.
Sort or another. It's a malevolent religion is a malign thing. So what are you saying that we should...
What I'm saying is goodness and wickedness both come from the human heart. There's no supernatural origin for these things. We are the origin of good and we are the origin of wickedness.
Where there is no God. - Was it necessary in order to tell this story to essentially, well, you kill God, don't you? He dissolves, he blows away.
Yes, with a sigh of the most profound and exhausted relief. He is tired, he is old. And you've had enough of him? He's had enough. Record number two.
This is one of the Goldberg variations, Bach's Goldberg variations. I love this work. It's inexhaustibly inventive and refreshing and full of delight and imaginative power.
On the piano too. The piano seems to be the natural home for the Goldberg variations, although it was of course written for the harpsichord.
And the piano version I like the most at the moment is that by Angela Hewitt. This is the first variation.
Variation number one played by Angela Hewitt. It comes as a surprise after all of that then Philip Pullman to hear that your grandfather was a clergyman and you lived with him in the rectory in Norfolk for some part of your childhood I mean did he put you off organized religion or something?
No, absolutely not. He was the kindest of men, the most delightful companion, storyteller...
An impatient man in some ways, a Bruce command, a Victorian, very much a Victorian, a man of his generation, a man of total rock-like certainty in the truths of the religion he professed. But he didn't force it on me.
No, not at all. But the storyteller, you say, so is that... That was the important thing. ...do you think where you began to learn your craft?
Yes, he told all sorts of stories, stories that he made up, stories from the Bible, stories about Buffalo, Bill, all kinds of stories.
From all over the world and this was the this is the thing I love I remember and love about him most. And did you tell stories as a little boy? Oh yes yes all the time I told stories my friends my brother to my to myself I wrote them down. About what? Oh creepy things mostly.
And that sort of thing. I love ghost stories. And what did you read? What fed your appetite for narrative as a child? Again, anything and everything.
From Noddy to Arthur Ransom to Longfellow's Hiawatha to Rudyard Kipling, everything. And the Fowley travelled around a lot, as I understand it. Your father was in the RAF, he was a...
I looked with him too. - That's right, my father was in the RAF and we moved to what was then called Southern Rhodesia, Zimbabwe.
When I was six. Then we moved back to England again, and my father was killed in a plane crash, and then my mother married again. Also an RAF officer, so we --
Moved with him when he was posted to Australia. So we moved about a lot. So there was a lot of excitement of travel but also this awful drama of your father.
It was a drama but it was off stage you see. We didn't know him terribly well, my brother and I, because he was always away such a lot. So we felt that something rather grand and important had happened to us.
That we were sort of almost orphaned. Gosh, that was a dramatic thing to be... But it happened elsewhere and we were told, you know, by means of a telegram or something. So it was not an immediate shock. - You make it sound very dispassionate, your reaction.
I don't think it was dispassionate, but maybe perhaps part of me was already thinking, Ah, so this is what it feels like to be half an orphan. That's interesting, I'll make a note of that.
And indeed Lyra in your book is an orphan isn't she? Well she would appear to be... A lot of the characters in children's books are either orphaned or separated from their parents. Because parents say things... You hear of children wanting to be an orphan or wanting to discover they were adopted. It's a strange... Why do children want that?
Part of our growing up involves the awful discovery, usually in our early teen years, that we've been put in the wrong family by mistake. And who are these awful people I have to live with? Surely I don't belong with them. I must be a princess or something.
Your mother remarried another RAF man? That's right, yes. And off you set for Australia? Yes, and so we were in Australia by the time I was nine.
It was exciting partly because the way you travelled in those days was to go by sea and travelling across the surface of the earth is always far more exciting than going by air where you get into a metal tube one end and get out the other and you don't see anything of the world. So lots of good snippets of material.
Were you consciously storing them away? Not consciously but certainly unconsciously. Memories of the way the shape of the waves changes when you go round the cape of good hope and the colour of the sea changes.
Of the ship slowing down as you come towards a, you know, a land fall, a port after several days at sea. These things are very deeply embedded in my, well, my physical memories, you know, because you feel seasick and then you don't feel seasick, you feel warm and then you feel cold, you know, those things.
Next piece of music. Well, the next piece of music is one that was a hit when I was in Australia And I was a boy in Australia and there
There's no television then in Australia, so we listen to the radio all the time, and this was one of the... one of the... one of the tunes that was a big hit.
Around that time. Its memories are made of this. And a kiss The memories you gave me
*outro music*
Dean Martin and the memories are made of this.
So from Australia, Philip Pullman, to Wales, and enter into the life of the adolescent Philip Pullman, a very important person named Miss Enid Jones, your teacher.
Did she do for you? And it was a marvelous teacher. She taught us all the things that were on the exam syllabus-- the Shakespeare and the metaphysical poets
And I had an affinity with the subject anyway. I loved reading poetry, I loved writing and I could analyse sentences with no difficulty. All that sort of grammar. I loved it because it was easy, I could do it. But I felt a great sort of kinship with her. She put on a school play every year and I...
I was first in the queue to audition for that. And I always enjoyed it enormously.
There was that and she encouraged my writing too. Not that I was doing very much writing in those days, I would write poetry and so on, but we'd do a weekly essay and once a turn we'd be allowed to write a story, which was a great treat. Did she read yours out to the class?
Yeah. Mm, all of that. I'm interested, though, that you liked grammar. There is a kind of logic and a sympathy, an instinctive sympathy, it seems to me, in you with things technical. I'm thinking now about your book, Clockwork. And again, you describe the kind of winding up of a clock and all the little pieces that go towards making clockwork.
Work don't you? That's an interesting point. That's very interesting. Yes you're quite right I do like seeing how things work. With proper clocks you can take them apart and see what makes them tick. See how they work and this bit connects to that bit. And I suppose constructing a story is something like that. When you do it consciously you have to come to the conscious fitting together bit. And the pleasure when you see oh yes if I put that bit in there and then a little later on it can do that and that'll happen. Oh that's wonderful. There's a real delight a real sort of buzz from that. I suppose the greatest example of this is in the story of Oedipus hell bent on discovering who it was that had
then discovering to his horror that it's him. And he was never going to avoid it. That's right. Does that mean if there's an inevitability, as we say, to that unwinding when you're doing it, and we've said that you write so much per day, no more, no less...
Does it mean you don't suffer from writer's block? It just flows? Well this business about writer's block. I don't know just did two plumbers get plumbers block
Could you get to the doctor and say, Well, doctor, I'm in a terrible pain. He said, I can't treat you today. I've got doctor's block. There's no such thing as writer's block. There are times when it's difficult to write and times when it's easy to write. But what you have to do is do the same amount every day, no matter whether it's difficult or easy, and it'll mount up. Eventually, the difficulties will disappear and it'll become easy again. But isn't there, don't you also have a little bit of a superstition about it? Don't you always write a sentence the night before the...
Get you started the next morning just in case you hit the block. You have to cover all the bases. Pickford number four.
Oh yes, well this is a lovely example of a kind of music I grew to love when I was visiting Africa when I was about 20 years old. My peripatetic parents were living in Uganda at the time and I spent a couple of holidays with them and loved the music that was on the radio and in the clubs. It was music, a lot of it came from Zaire and a lot of that music was influenced in turn by Latin American music.
Example of the top orchestra from Zaya, the orchestra OK Jazz, playing a song called Bolingo Yapuji. Franco and the orchestra.
Okay, jazz playing balingo, yabuji. You went to Oxford, Philip, Exeter College, to read English. You only got a third and...
You got only a third and you said that it was an absolutely useless waste of time. Why was that? Well, it was rather harsh perhaps, but I shouldn't have put it...
Quite as harshly as that. What I now realize I should have done was to get to art school and do something physical with my hands, making things. But the weight of that was--
I'd been barred years before because of the, you know, the way the school timetable works. If you're clever, you had to do Latin and not art, so I couldn't do art from... And if you wanted to get into Oxford...
All that sort of stuff, yes. I wish now that I'd had the chance to go to art school and learn to draw properly because that's what I would really have loved to do. But you're a published artist in that you've illustrated your own books. Yes, I've craftily managed to sneak in.
On my illustrations. So could you as easily have been an illustrator? It's something which I would love to do. I don't know if I got the talent for it, but it would have been lovely to find out.
Married and then you trained to be a teacher, your wife was a teacher and obviously you needed to provide for the family and you had two boys.
Where was this ambition to write then? Because you said that you intended to be a writer from when you were six years old. I don't think I intended to be a writer. I intended to write. Being a writer is not the same thing as writing. You mean being a published writer? No, I wanted to write. I wanted to tell stories. That's the important thing. So you'd never really intended to make your living by it? I hoped that I might be able to. Okay.
What was the first novel you wrote, the first full-length? When did you write it and what was it? Well, I began to write it the day after I finished my final exams at Oxford and I discovered in the first morning that either they'd left something fundamental out of the English course I'd just done or else I hadn't been paying attention. It's a matter of point of view, it's a matter of who's telling the story and where it's coming from. In the words of David Mamet, the film director, it's the question, Where do I put the camera? It's a fundamental question, a very interesting and important question. And somehow I hadn't noticed that they were talking about that.
They did. In my A-level English degree at Oxford, I'd missed it out. Why did you notice it the morning after your final? Because I was doing it. Because when you tell a story, you have to decide where you're telling it from. And the actual doing of it was the, that was the first big lesson.
I learned. So that was the first... I went on to complete that novel and it was absolutely dreadful and it wasn't published and I read a number of other things that were dreadful. But I was learning all the time, you see. Learning not least that if you want to finish something you have to work at it steadily and accumulate the pages at a regular rate. And when did you discover that fantasy was really the right kind of medium for what you had to say or the story you had to tell?
Well, quite recently. I'd always tried to be realistic, tried to describe the real world.
But I discovered in Northern Lights a story that wouldn't work if I did that. It had to be in a different world and it had to have elements of the fantastical in it. And to my surprise and not...
Embarrassment. I discovered that I was enjoying this enormously. I was rather good at it. And when did you discover that it was children that you should be writing for? Oh, that was much more easy to see. When I was teaching, I started writing plays to put on at school. I was teaching in a middle school and I was teaching children not quite old enough to do Shakespeare, you know, in a really interesting way. So I had to write the plays that I...
And I discovered I loved it. I loved telling stories that both children and their parents would enjoy. You've got a mixed audience.
I love telling a story to this mixed audience and that's what I've really enjoyed most ever since. There's no feeling quite like it. It's so intoxicating and so pleasurable that I couldn't stop even if I had to.
Liquid number five Jazz has always been important to me. I've loved jazz ever since
I was a boy and I heard, what was that record that was a big hit, then Dave Brubeck's Take Five. Well, that led me to all sorts of other things. And out of the great spectrum of jazz…
fill a whole braggin' with just jazz. This is a piece I'm very fond of 'cause I bought the record when I was young and I played it until it was scratched and hardly.
They listen to a bull at all.
I'll remember April, played by Lee Curtis.
With the Gerry Mulligan quartet. Your single most compelling idea, I think, in the trilogy, Philip, is that all human beings have these things called demons. And they're not demons with an e, they're demons with a diphthong, an ae. Why has he got a diphthong there? When I first thought of the demon, it was one of those sort of moments when you've been sitting there for months and nothing's happened and it's gone nowhere. And suddenly I found myself writing the words lyra and her demon, and I didn't know she had a demon.
Until then and it was spelled T-A-E and joined together with that ligature M-O-N. So I had to write the rest of the chapter to see what they were doing and what this demon was.
And then I realized what an idea I'd got. It was the best idea I've ever had, I think. - What is it? - The idea-- - I mean, is it the soul, alter ego? - It's...
Most of none of those things and all of them. It has the form of an animal and it's you, but it's part of you that's external and it's born with you and it dies with you and it's usually the opposite sex.
And the interesting thing about demons or the thing that when I realized it showed me how rich the idea was is this that children's demons can change shape from moment to moment and At adolescence they sort of achieve a fixed form and keep that for the rest of your life So adults would have a in liar as well would also
of a demon and it would be a snake or a cat or whatever it might be. So I'm sure you've been asked this before, what are you? Probably something like a magpie or a jackdaw, one of these birds that hang about the place picking up shiny bits of stuff. But there's something slightly worrying about that image isn't there? Something sort of very slightly dark and brooding about that image. I wonder if if there isn't something
dark and brooding about you somewhere? Yes, well, melancholy or melancholia is a visitor that recurs from time to time. The remedy for it is Dr Johnson, that great melancholic, said is if you're solitary be not idle and if you're idle be not solitary. So you keep busy? Keep busy and keep your friends.
Friendships intact. Churning out a thousand words a day. And how much has that informed what you've told me you believe? You know that you can have heaven here on earth by being decent, honest, truthful, and active. And busy. That's the point, yes. If you just
life away, you're not doing much good. As Lyra discovers in The World of the Dead, in the Amber Spyglass, the ghosts of the children there when she visits The World of the Dead beg her to tell them a story.
She tells him as true a story as she can think of. And then she discovers to her astonishment that the harpies who guard the ghosts in this terrifying place have also been listening. And the harpies say that if you go down to the world of the dead and tell them the true story of your life, then they will guide you to the way out where you're going.
Can vanish into the world again. But if you go down there without a story to tell, they won't do that, so you'll be there forever. So the only way to get out of the world of the dead is to live this life as fully as you can and achieve what you can do and end up with a story to tell. Experience things. Live life. Number six. One of the ways in which I think of myself when I ever do is, as a European, I feel profoundly and sliddly European. And of the great things that Europe has discovered and invented and given to the world, such as the scientific method and parliamentary democracy, one of the greatest is the symphony orchestra. And right at the very heart of the repertoire of the symphony orchestra is Beethoven.
And this great mountain. And I couldn't select eight records for a desert island without having something by Beethoven. So this is the opening of the Fifth Symphony.
- This is the fifth symphony played by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Carlos Kleiber. Can you explain, Philip Pullman, the new popularity of fantasy books? I mean, there's been Harry Potter, of course,
Yours and more and this kind of universality of its appeal. Why suddenly again are we hungry for fantasy?
I'm not sure and I'm not sure that it's Suddenly happened again. I think it was always there, but sort of underground but it's come to the fore now It's come to the fore now partly because Harry Potter is such a huge and universal success and maybe my
Books have had something to do with it as well. - And they're all being translated into films. We've had Harry Potter, we've had, of course, Lord of the Rings. What about yours? - Well, there are plans to make it into a film or films. - Do they worry you, these plans?
brewed over them like a parent? Absolutely not, no. I think it's in good hands and I will watch it from a distance with benevolent interest. Oh really, you don't feel proprietorial at all about it? Not at all, no. I'm not a filmmaker, I'm not a screenwriter, I'm not...
I'm a novelist. Yeah, but that's a very unemotional line to take, isn't it? I mean, usually people feel, well, you know, say if they cast... Say if they cast Dawn French as Lyra or something, I don't know. The wrong style of figure, as it were. Dawn French is a very fine actress and I'm sure she could make a very good fist at playing Lyra. Who would you really like to have play Lyra? If they do make a film, it won't happen for another two or three years, at least. And so the child who would be the right age to play Lyra then is very young now.
Nobody knows who she is. - So you'll stick to just the writing. What are you writing now? - I'm writing another.
I'm writing another of the books of the sort I call fairy tales, such as 'Clockwork' and 'I Was a Rat' and another one called 'The Firework Maker's Daughter', which I'm very fond of. It's about 100, 120 pages, that sort of length. I call them fairy tales.
But will you return to Lyra and Will? Will they find each other again in another world where they can be together? I shall return to the world of Lyra.
Because there are a lot of stories left in that world that I want to tell. I think that particular story has come to an end, but we may see the characters again. - Michael number seven. - One of my great musical passions is the piano music of Nikolai Metna, who becomes visible for a while and then disappears again and is forgotten, and then surfaces again when another...
Gets hold of his work and becomes passionate about it and plays it all. He was a contemporary of Rachmaninoff and a wonderful pianist and a most marvelous composer. I love his music because it is so full of melody. It's rich, it's complicated music. I can't begin to describe it in technical terms or follow it although I try to on the...
On the page of music to see what's going on, but it's... I just love the sound it makes, the sound world he inhabits.
Sonata Reminiscienza in A minor by Nikolai Midner played by Emile Gillils. Um, I can't have a hunch.
That you'd be alright on this desert island. That there's, you know, you're quite a practical chap, really, aren't you? I see you've got plasters on your fingers. Hacking up on your fingers.
Away at something. Yes, I secotered my finger the other day. Yes, I do like making things and I'd be quite happy hauling branches about and putting stands together to make walls and so on. I'd quite enjoy that. I would miss human
That's the most awful thing. But could you, do you think you'd write or draw? Could you find something to scrape away with? Oh, I'd have to, yes. And a bit of old bark or something? Yes, I'd have to do something like that. What about spiritually? I mean, from what you've said, um...
You'd have to believe it was heaven, wouldn't you? Where you were. That's where I am, that's where I'd be. I'd have to make it as good as I could.
Think you could or do you think you just give up and descend to that ghastly deadly for rustling place that you describe oh I hope I'd keep at it in the words of dr. Johnson I've got it before if you're solitary be not idle I'd have to be active all the time could you do that oh yes I think so last piece of music
The final piece of music is by Berlioz, a character I've always enjoyed. His memoirs are the most terrific yarn, full of wild exaggeration and romantic exuberance and energy. And this is from the 'Overture les frangieux'.
Part of Billy O's day.
Franguge played by the London classical players conducted by Roger Norrington. Now if you could only take one of those eight, which one would you take?
Because I love it so much, because it's so intimate, I would take the metna, the sonata reminiscenza. It would be a good companion for me. What about your book, there's the complete works of Shakespeare, the Bible, which is
Presumably you don't want. Oh, the Bible's full of good stuff. There are some wonderful yarns in the Bible, and there's a lot of wisdom too in the book of Proverbs and elsewhere, so I wouldn't at all be reluctant to have the Bible with me. But as for another book, it would have to be the greatest novel I've ever read, which is Proust's Great Work, because there's so much in it. It's so full of life. It's funny, it's tragic, it's ironic, it's inexhaustible.
- Le Recherche du Temps, Perdu. - That's the one. And your luxury? My luxury would have to be a painting. It's a painting by the greatest painter of still life, Chardin. It's called The Jar of Apricots, and it's one of his delightful still lifes of little ordinary everyday things that you see in a kitchen. Apart from the beauty of the way the paint is applied and the exquisite way the forms are arranged, it's full of little intriguing things. There's a parcel there which is wrapped in paper and string. There's a loaf of bread and a knife, and there's a delicate little porcelain cup into which somebody's just poured, perhaps, coffee or chocolate or something, because there's a drift of steam coming off the top. And I'd like to imagine that whoever poured that would be just out of the...
And perhaps bringing a chair for me to sit on or something to come and talk. So it's a picture that suggests human companionship without limiting it to one face. So I could imagine anyone I wanted to sitting down with me to drink this and enjoying the apricots. Philip Pullman, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Thank you very much. You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bh.org.au
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Transcript generated on 2024-04-29.