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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

And this week I'm very pleased to welcome as my guest, the writer Graham Rob,

whose new book is The Discovery of Britain.

It's a book that's a sort of mixture of history and memoir and travelogue and all sorts of other things.

But it begins, as I think many of your books do, Graham, with a bicycle.

Can you tell us where this starts?

Yes.

Well, in my life, most things begin with the bicycle because neither I nor my wife, Margaret,

have driven for 40 years as soon as we left the United States, she pointed out that there was no point of having a car.

And the interesting thing is that even now, when we live on the Anglo-Skottish border,

we're eight miles from the nearest shop,

we still don't feel the need of a car.

And the curious thing is that sometimes in Oxford,

it's full of bicycles.

We'd arrive at someone's house for a dinner party,

...