The best things in life for free.

If you subscribe to The Spectator, you'll get a whole month for free.

And after that, you'll only pay a pound for full access to our website and to our app.

And if you want to pay two pounds, you'll get our magazine too.

To claim this offer, go to spectator.com.uk forward slash free.

Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator, and this week I'm joined by Tom Whipple,

who's science editor of the Times, and who, away from this busy day job, has written a new book called The Battle of the Beams, The Secret Science of Radar, that turned the tide of the Second World War. Tom, welcome. Hello. Now, obviously, it's quite a statement that this Battle of Radar turned the tide of the Second World War. Can you tell me how important really was Radar and the technological arms race of Radar? And why is that

aspect of the Second World War, if it is as important as your subtitle, so little known?

Yeah, I mean, well, look, I think we all know that subtitles don't only carry the nuance of a book.

And one of the ways in which it doesn't carry the nuance is it's so much more than

radar.

It is about radio waves in general.

And I was interested in this to an extent because my grandparents met whilst being researchers in, as we were told as children, in

radar. And I think they probably, we were told that as children, because saying that they got

to know each other working on radio sounds like they were doing just sort of light entertainment

for radio too, whereas in fact, they were both mathematicians. The radio spectrum was this really new thing.

Between the wars, there was this idea.

We'd just discovered this comparatively.

There's this tiny sliver of light that we can see.

And outside of this, there's this whole world of x-rays and microwaves and radio waves and all sorts of

things. And between the wars, there was really this idea that within this, there would be a

...