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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 delighted to be joined by Carmen Khalil, the publisher and writer and all-round

superstar, whose new book is called Oh Happy Day, Those Times and These Times.

Now to start with, you know, anyone picking up a book called Oh Happy Day might expect a bit less dysentery, flogging and child mortality.

I agree. I agree.

But if you're going to write about the British Empire and what people suffered from it,

you have to sort of get readers to pick it up. I mean, there is a happy story in the middle of it.

But the British Empire, which is not correctly taught in schools, as you know, I think,

that I think it so, included a heck of a lot of suffering, so you can't

write about it without writing about that, particularly to their own people. I mean, I think what I

wanted to do, Sam, though God knows anything that happened to convicts and Australians was

nothing in comparison to what happened to West Indians and

Indians but nevertheless the suffering quota for the British Empire was tremendous really

and so I wanted to point that out.

Did you start out wanting to write about the Empire and find a word doing it through your own

family or did you start out wanting to write about your own family and find it turning to the empire? find a way of doing it through your own family or did you start out wanting

to write about your own family and find it turning to the story of empire? No absolutely. The book

changed twice. It was meant to be my memoirs for which I've had a contract for many, many years

and I always give them a different book. But I am going to start my memoirs when this is over.

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