John Sutherland

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the writer and academic John Sutherland. He is the recently retired Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College, London, a past Chairman of the Booker Prize panel and the author of one of the standard texts on Victorian fiction. But his route into academia was a curious one - and his life inside the ivory towers far from smooth.

His father was killed in the war and he was brought up by his extended family in a peripatetic childhood. He joined the army but, with no war to fight, left his commission and went to university instead. He worked in Scotland and America but as his reputation grew, so did his dependence on alcohol. He finally hit rock bottom while in America and stopped drinking 23 years ago. Today he is a pre-eminent literary figure - combining erudition and historical research with a taste for the modern and the new.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: The Piano has been Drinking (Not Me) by Tom Waits Book: Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray Luxury: iPod