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Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator, and this week my guest is the journalist and author Celia Breyfield, whose new book takes us back to the 19th century and writing Black Beauty, Anna Sewell and the story of animal rights. Celia, welcome. Now, a lot of people,

particularly of my generation, I think, the moment we hear the words Black Beauty, we think of that

immortal theme tune and that black mare galloping across the

Heathland on a sort of television adaptation that was playing all through the 70s and 80s,

as far as I could tell. What was it that made you want to kind of come back and look at the

original book and go back? Because it's very different from most of the adaptations that have

been made subsequently, isn't it? Yes, I mean, you know, to dispose of the dearly loved but completely irrelevant television series

with that unforgettable theme to you.

That was, it was nothing to do with the book, basically.

It was simply the same title, and they extrapolated a story after the action of the book had finished. So what made

we want to think about Black Beauty? I'm a big champion of popular fiction. I work at a university,

which is an uncomfortable place to be a champion of popular fiction because your colleagues are

always calling popular fiction trash or unworthy

of discussion. And I mean, there are two reasons that I really want to take up the cause of

popular fiction. One is because I like it and so do millions of other people. And the other is because

it affects social change. It really changes the

world. Popular books are read by millions of people and they carry on the public discourse with the

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