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

literary editor to The Spectator. My guest this week is Al Murray, whose new book is Command,

How the Allies Learned to Win the Second World War. Al, welcome. Now, you'll be used to being asked this,

but we know you best as a comedian,

and here you come galloping out.

I mean, it's like when the keyboard player

after D Ream turns out to be an expert astrophysicist

or, you know, Nadine Dory's,

the competitor on I'm a celebrity,

kind of turns out to be a politician.

There's obviously real deep knowledge and interest on military history with you.

Is this a sort of academic specialism that just, you know, took a back seat to another career or a private hobby?

Or how did you come to it?

It's a private passion, really. I came to it it's a private passion really i came to it because

my father is hugely interested in the subject to the second world war he was born in

in 1937 his father did all sorts of strange stuff we think with the foreign office but we don't

know what it all was my mother's father was killed in the fighting outside Dunkirk in a place

called Hauserbrook and she never knew her dad. So he was killed before she was born. So the war

sort of hung heavy in our family's footprint, I think. And my dad was really, really, really

interesting in it. So we would, when I was a boy, we would, you know, I remember we went to

Normandy, you know, and went and looked at Pegasus Bridge and the Concanal properly and the

Merville Battery and the Mulberry Harbour and stuff like that. And he would talk about what

...