On Thursday the 15th of May, the Spectator is hosting a live book club event.

Sam Leith, the host of this podcast, will be joined by former Telegraph Editor-in-Chief

and military historian Max Hastings.

It will be an opportunity to talk about Max's new book, Sword, D-Day, Trial by Battle,

as well as mark the 80th anniversary of V-E-Day.

The full details are as follows.

7.30 on Thursday the 15th of May at the Shaw Theatre in Houston, London, and tickets start from £27.50, although I believe there are ticket options that include a signed copy of the book.

For those tickets, go to www. Spectator.com.com.com. We look forward to seeing you there.

Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for

The Spectator. My guest this week is the

novelist and poet Joe Dunthorne, but we're here to talk about his first non-fiction book,

which is called Children of Radium. Joe, welcome. Quite early on, it becomes clear that this is not

even the book you were intending to write. Sort of Withdale style, you've written a book by accident.

You were going to write about your grandmother, won't you? That was the idea, yeah. And I had a kind of

limited idea, probably like the ideal lack of knowledge about what her life was like, just

little enough to really think it would be a

great idea to write about her life, just little enough to have this kind of fantasy about what

I thought her childhood had been like growing up in as a Jewish girl in 1920s and 30s, Germany.

And then I made the mistake of actually interviewing her about her life.

And yeah, she told me all the ways in which I had it completely wrong. And it's actually she was

quite a kind of cross-patch sort of figure. Yes, she was because she lived all over the place

in her in her life. She grew up in Germany. But then when she was, I lived all over the place in her life.

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