Desert Island Discs

This week, Sue Lawley's castaway is the Irish businessman and writer Bill Cullen. He was one of 14 children born to William Cullen and Mary Darcy. His childhood, in the tenement slums of inner-city Dublin was one of extreme poverty. Born during the war, the family lived in a one-room dilapidated tenement. Learning the secrets of street trading from his mother and grandmother, Bill started selling from market stalls from the age of five. He sold everything from fruit to evening papers home-fashioned Judy Garland dolls to paper flowers. He eventually started working in a car dealership and went on to own Renault Ireland. He is now a millionaire many times over. He puts his success down to sheer hard work and the support and determination of a close knit family. He has written about his life and says his autobiography, It's A Long Way From Penny Apples, is a tribute to the strong women of Ireland - like his own mother - who held families together through thick and thin. Royalties from the book have been given to the charity of which he is a director, The Irish Youth Foundation. In the past 17 years he has raised £20 million through his charitable work. He is now working on his second book Streetwise, which will impart the business knowledge he has gained over the years.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]Favourite track: New York, New York by Frank Sinatra Book: Glimpses by Brendan Kennelly Luxury: An accordion

This week Sue Lawley's castaway is the journalist and songwriter Herbert Kretzmer. Born in South Africa in 1925, he came to Europe after World War II. For a while he lived in Paris, playing piano in a bar. He rubbed shoulders with Jean Paul Sartre and became friends with one of France's greatest singer-songwriters Charles Aznavour. The two formed a musical partnership and Kretzmer re-worked many of his songs into English - including the hits Yesterday, When I Was Young and She, which was more recently recorded by Elvis Costello for the film Notting Hill. His day job was as a journalist and Kretzmer wrote celebrity profiles for the Daily Express. He says his most memorable interviewees were "writers and fighters", including George Foreman, Muhammad Ali, Truman Capote and Arthur Miller. But it wasn't until he was nearly sixty that he had his greatest success. The director Cameron Mackintosh was working on Les Miserables but did not have a 'book' - that is, a set of songs that he could produce. He remembered a chance meeting he'd had with Kretzmer, recalled the songs he'd written and his connection with France - and invited him to write the lyrics. The show has been running in London for the past 19 years and has played all over the world. Now aged 78, he continues to work. He is currently collaborating with the former ABBA musicians, Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus on another musical.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]Favourite track: Gymnopedies by Yikin Seow Book: The Great War and Modern Memory by Prof Paul Fussell Luxury: Zippo Lighter

This week Sue Lawley's castaway is the broadcaster, cook, mother and domestic goddess Nigella Lawson. She came from a privileged background - her father, the former Conservative chancellor Nigel Lawson, her mother the society beauty and heir to the Lyons Corner House empire Vanessa Salmon. After graduating from Oxford, she wrote a restaurant column for the Spectator. She became deputy literary editor of the Sunday Times in 1986 and it was on that paper that she met John Diamond - the couple married three years later. She credits him with uncovering her potential - suggesting she wear more flattering clothes and make-up, encouraging her food writing and investing faith and pride in her. He came up with the title of her first book How to Eat. It was a huge success and was followed by a second, award-winning book How to be a Domestic Goddess, which held out hope to would-be goddesses that even the most meagre skills could produce stunning results. But her life has been tainted by cancer. Her mother died of liver cancer in her 40s and her sister Thomasina was in her 30s when she died of breast cancer. When her husband had hospital tests for a cyst on his neck it was Nigella who chased up the doctors to find out the results and interrupted EastEnders to tell him that he too had been diagnosed with the disease. John Diamond died in 2001, leaving Nigella to bring up their two children, Cosima and Bruno. She has written a further two books and her series Nigella Bites has been bought up by American television. She says "I suppose I do think that awful things can happen at any moment, so while they are not happening you may as well be pleased."[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]Favourite track: Yeke, Yeke by Mary Kante Book: Divine Comedy (in Italian) by Dante Alighieri Luxury: Liquid Temazepam "...to give me the possibility of a very pleasant exit"

This week Sue Lawley's castaway is the internationally successful author Nick Hornby. Originally from suburban Maidenhead, his obsession with football, as chronicled in the autobiographical Fever Pitch, began after his parents divorced and his dad struggled to find a suitable way to pass the weekend. The decision to visit Arsenal had lasting repercussions with Hornby becoming a fanatical supporter. His next work, High Fidelity, featured Horrnby's other great passion - pop music. It became a bible for all men who've ever catalogued their record collections in alphabetical order or agonised over their own Desert Island Discs choices. His next book, About a Boy, resulted in a bidding war with Robert De Niro's film company buying the rights for £2 million. How to Be Good, which followed, changed tack with a female narrator and is in part autobiographical reflecting the pros and cons of a virtuous life - questions he's had to ask following the birth of his son Danny who suffers from severe autism. He's since set up the TreeHouse Fund, a national charity for autism which has a school in London.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]Favourite track: Kitty's Back by Bruce Springsteen Book: Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens Luxury: An mp3 player (iPod)

This week Sue Lawley's castaway is the Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel. Still only in his 30s, he's sung at the world's biggest opera houses and can pick and choose where he works and the productions he wants to star in. He began singing in his first competitions at the age of three. Born into a farming family in the tiny village of Pentglas in North Wales which has only a handful of houses, one shop and one church, he was brought up singing at Chapel and regularly competed and won the National Eistedfodd cultural event.His first language was Welsh and as a young child he had to communicate with English children camping on his parents land in the summer holidays with sign language. It was from those children he eventually learnt the language and by watching television. As a teenager, he considered being a fireman or a policeman, but he won a scholarship to the Guildhall in London and the rest is history. Since then, he's performed and recorded all the great operatic works as well as a number of 'cross-over' CDs of hits from musicals and also an album in Welsh.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]Favourite track: Return to Sender by Elvis Presley Book: Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt Luxury: Millenium Centre in Cardiff

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the popular novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford. Born in Upper Armley, Leeds, by the age of 16 Barbara had graduated from the typing pool and was a cub reporter in the newsroom of the Yorkshire Evening Post. By twenty she was Fashion Editor of Woman's Own in London.In 1976, after a number of failed attempts, she sold her first novel to a publisher on the basis of a ten-page outline. That book A Woman of Substance, has gone on to sell in the region of 20 million copies. The heroine, Emma Harte, inspired such a following that she and her dynasty were the subjects of two further books and despite Emma being 'killed off' in the second, Taylor Bradford has resurrected her for a 'lost years' prequel this summer. Emma's Secret will be her 19th novel, with 10 of them made into TV films.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]Favourite track: Vissi d'Arte by Giacomo Puccini Book: David Copperfield by Charles Dickens Luxury: Bag of eye make-up, especially mascara

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the architect Daniel Libeskind. Daniel Libeskind's parents were Polish Jews. Daniel himself was a prodigiously talented musician, but the family couldn't afford the attention a piano would draw to them and so he learned the accordion. In Israel he won a prestigious music scholarship - Daniel Barenboim and Itzhak Perlmen were other recipients - and the family moved to New York. In his teens Libeskind dropped music suddenly and completely and turned to architecture: In 1989 he won the commission to build a Jewish Museum in Berlin and it opened in 2001 amid much controversy. Closer to home he has designed and built the Imperial War Museum North at Trafford, Manchester - its design based on a shattered globe to reflect the themes of conflict. One of his most controversial designs in this country is the proposed V&A extension known as The Spiral. It has been variously described as 'a public lavatory', 'a pile of boxes' and 'quartz crystals'. His most recent commission and his biggest project to date is the complex to be built at the site of the destroyed twin towers in New York. [Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]Favourite track: Aria from Goldberg Variations by Johann Sebastian Bach Book: The Prisons (Le Carceri): The Complete First and Second States by Giovanni Battista Piranesi Luxury: Pencil and paper

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is The Bishop of Birmingham, John Sentamu. When John Sentamu was born, the sixth of 13 children, near Kampala in Uganda in 1949, he was so small the local bishop was called in to baptise him immediately. He survived his birth, a sickly childhood and a famine to become, a mere 25 years later, a judge in the Uganda High Court. In 1974 he managed to get a visa to leave Uganda and come to Britain where he studied theology with a view to returning to the Ugandan justice system at the end of his studies. However, when his friend the Ugandan Archbishop Janani Luwum was murdered he vowed "You kill my friend, I take his place", and he was ordained in 1979. He served in parishes in Cambridge and London, and was vicar of Holy Trinity Church in South London for 13 years during which time he raised £1.6 million to restore his church and its organ as well as increasing his congregation tenfold. He is now the Bishop of Birmingham, and one of only two senior bishops from ethnic minorities. He was an advisor to the Stephen Lawrence Judicial Inquiry and the Chairman of the Damilola Taylor Review board.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]Favourite track: I Was Glad by Sir Hubert Parry Book: The Complete Chronicles of Narnia by C S Lewis Luxury: A kitchen

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the veteran broadcaster Mark Tully. Born in Calcutta and with ancestors who were involved in the Indian Mutiny, he has a love of India in his bones and has made his career reporting it. Indeed, in his 30 years as BBC India correspondent his name and the role became synonymous - he has been called a cult figure and his reports were broadcast in English, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Nepali and Bengali to as many as 50 million people on the sub-continent.As a young man he considered entering the clergy but he left theology college to begin his career at the BBC. Shortly thereafter he returned to India after an absence of more than a decade and felt like he had come home. He's been there ever since. He has mapped the great events on the sub-continent since the 1960s, including Bangladesh's war of independence, the upheavals in Pakistan, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the Union Carbide disaster at Bhopal, the Indian army attack on the Golden Temple at Amritsa and the assassinations of both Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. He has heard a crowd chanting 'death to Tully' as well as being expelled from the country, captured, threatened, imprisoned and even accused of bringing down the government. For his pains he has been awarded the OBE and the Tadma Shre, an Indian honour rarely bestowed on foreigners. These days he spends a couple of months a year in Britain seeing friends and family and recording some of his Radio 4 programmes Something Understood.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]Favourite track: Requiem for Athene by Taverner Book: Major works by Gerard Manley Hopkins Luxury: Modern mini brewery

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is Vittorio Radice. Born in 1957 and brought up near Lake Como, Radice is the son of a furniture retailer. He surprised himself and his family by studying agriculture at Milan University, but he was never destined to become a farmer. His military service he insists entailed nothing much more pressing than typing and taking the general's wife shopping, but this seems to have been the last period of treading water in his life. After leaving the army he joined Associated Merchandising Corporation, one of the largest global buying organisations and by the age of 30 he was Head of Worldwide Sourcing for its Home department. In 1990 he joined Habitat International as Buying Director, and two years later was appointed Managing Director, transforming the company's losses of £7 million into profits of over £14 million. In 1996 he was headhunted to join Selfridges as Managing Director, quickly becoming Chief Executive and transforming its fortunes. This year he has joined Marks & Spencer Plc as Executive Director for the Home Group.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]Favourite track: Birima by Youssou N'dour Book: La première gorgée de Bière et autres plaisirs minuscules by Philippe Delerm Luxury: Sunglasses