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, the literary

of The Spectator. My guest this week is the scholar General Swift, whose new book is The Dream Factory, which tells the story, as his subtitle explains, of London's first playhouse and the making of William Shakespeare.

Another reference that immediately sprung to my mind when I opened this book was Jim Shapiro's Superb, 599, which describes the birth of the globe.

But this book tells a story of an earlier theatre, the theatre that came before.

Thank you, can you tell me what drew your attention to the theatre and what you think this was going to capture for you?

Thank you, Sam, for having me, and like you, I'm a huge admirer of 1599. I think it's a

brilliant book. The Globe is the playhouse that we most readily associate with Shakespeare,

and it's a wonderful, interesting structure. And what struck me when I started thinking about

this as a project was that Shakespeare was 35 years old when the globe was constructed in 1599.

And he was already in many ways a settled figure.

And the kind of one of the prompting questions for me was, how did he get there?

How did he get to that point?

What's the story of his earlier years?

You know, he wasn't born at all into a

...