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 VE 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,

literary editor-of-the-spectator, and I'm very pleased this week to be

joined by the scholar Farah de Boiola, whose new book is What is Free Speech, the history of a

dangerous idea? And it's a dangerous idea that obviously is never out of the news at the moment.

But Farah, can I ask you what inspired you in the first place to write this book?

Because you seem to say at the beginning that there's a lot of academic scholarship and work on censorship and so forth, but that the idea or the ideology of free speech is kind of seldom historicised.

Absolutely right, except by the Americans and we can get on to why that might be.

But it was inspired by my own experience of being censored.

Quite frankly, I wrote a book about a decade ago called The Origins of Sex,

the History in the First Sexual Revolution, and it's about the 18th century

and how people have new ideas about sexual freedom in that era.

And one of my first publicity events was to go on BBC Radio

3, night waves late at night in the studio, broadcasting house, to talk about the book. And I was

talking to the presenter, Rana Mitter, and he clearly read the book, which is a lovely surprise always.

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