Hunting The Philistines - Sir Harold Acton

Writer, scholar and aesthete Sir Harold Acton in conversation with novelist Derek Robinson.

Sir Harold talks about his many gifted contemporaries at Eton and Oxford, his years in China, his beautiful home in Florence, and about the recreation claimed in Who's Who - "hunting the Philistines ".

"When I reached Peking I felt I was perfectly at home ... there was Mussolini in Italy, fascism. Things were very ugly in Germany. I didn't really very much care for what was happening in England.... Here I was going to stay.... It was taken for granted that I was leading a life of sin."

Sir Harold Acton was a contemporary of Evelyn Waugh at Oxford University. Waugh dedicated his novel Decline and Fall to Harold Acton in 1928. Literary, artistic and socialite 1920s London was dubbed the time of the 'Bright Young Things' by the press.

Producer: Anthony Moncrieff

First broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in December 1979.