In the first of a series of three programmes, Sir John Gielgud reads from the reminiscences Disraeli wrote down in the first half of the 1860s. Not yet prime minister for the first time, he could look back upon 40 years of striving for literary and political success and social acceptance.
But Disraeli was a politician and a novelist, not a historian, and wrote the stories in order to put the past into the perspective from which he wanted it viewed. They are his closest approach to non-fictional autobiography, and contain some of his finest and wittiest writings.
Introduced by Lord Blake, who also made the selection
Producer john KNIGHT