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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 my guest this week is a regular spectator and favourite, Iscender Maxton Graham, whose new book strikes a nostalgic chord as summer starts to disappear into the rearview mirror, and it called British summertime begins the school summer holidays 1930 to 1980. Send a welcome it. This is an absolute

festival of nostalgia for those of us who went through the British summer holidays at some

point in that period. But can I stop by asking you about

the period? Because I know historians kind of argue back and forth about periodisation and that

sort of thing. But your last book, how does it cut off the invention of the duvet? Yes, I cut this one

off at the very first computer game, which I think was Binatone tennis, where you

hit a little electronic tennis ball over a net. And that was sort of late 1970s. I let the book

gone to 1980 just before the personal computer came into our lives. I suppose because that was

really when summer, as we knew it ceased to exist because, as I say in the book, these computer games

gave you prep-packaged alternative

worlds to consume your hours rather than, and save you having to invent your own. So that was why I cut

off 1980 this time. And 1930 was presumably about as old as you could find somebody who could talk to

you about it, because it's a book of oral. Yes, oral social history. And I did want to be able to talk

to people. And I particularly wanted to have people who were nine in 1939, so they would have remembered that dreadful

day when it was both the end of summer holidays bad enough and war broke out.

That must have been a double, a double blow.

Exactly.

There were, of course, a lot of children during wartime have recalled it as being a sort of very happy period, haven't they?

Well, that's the extraordinary thing, and that's what we can talk about in a way,

...