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Hello and welcome to Spectator Out Loud. Each week we choose three pieces from the magazine and ask their writers to read them aloud.

I'm Oscar Redington and on this

podcast, Lionel Schreiber asked whether we're kidding ourselves over Ukraine. Theo Hobson talks about

Martin Luther King and the demise of liberal Protestantism. And John Mayer reads his review of

cinema speculation, the new memoir by Quentin Tarantino. Up first, Lionel Shriver.

Optimism can be surprisingly hilarious.

In my last novel, two spouses agree to quit the planet once they both turned 80,

and the book explores a dozen possible outcomes of their pact.

No chapter made me chuckle at the keyboard more than once upon a time in Lambeth, in which the couple don't kill themselves, but live

to 110 in perfect health because they eat their vegetables. Young people flock to their table for advice,

as my protagonists grow only wiser and more physically riveting in old age.

Meanwhile, modern monetary theory makes everything free.

Limitless energy is derived from carbon dioxide.

A new portmanteau religion, Jeslam, eliminates Islamist terrorism.

The reader gradually twigs that this happy-clappy scenario is a piss take.

My improbably sunny Chapter 12 is clearly the one version of the couple's advanced years sure never to happen.

Are we in danger of shining the same improbable sunniness on Ukraine? If so, this particular wishful thinking isn't funny.

Our chapter 12 in Kiev goes something like this.

With unstinting military support from the West,

the little engine that could Ukrainian army continues to take territory

from demoralized, poorly equipped Russian forces.

...