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Go to spectator.co.uk slash summer.

Hi. co.uk slash summer. Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator, and this week we're hunting

wabets.

It's been 50 years last year since Richard Adams' children's classic Watership Down was

published,

and a new graphic novel adaptation is planned.

Richard Adams, unfortunately, died in 2016,

but I'm joined now by his daughters Juliet and Rosamond,

who are the custodians of the flame.

Juliet and Ros, welcome.

Now, Watership Down, obviously, it's a huge monument in the canon of literature for children

and not quite children, but it had its origins, as many children's stories do, in the

authors' stories he spun for his own children.

Can you tell me, do you remember the origins of Watership

down long before it was in print? Yes, we do indeed. The story was told to us as children on

a long car journey on the road to Stratford on Avon. And we must have been about, what, five and

seven, six and eight? I was seven, I think.

Yeah, yeah.

...