As the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Britain approaches, Al Murray has voiced a new audiobook of James Holland’s brilliant account of the events of 1940. In this exclusive extract, Al reads a chapter outlining the frequency of pilots

Merry Christmas from We Have Ways of Making You Talk. Over the next 12 days Al and James are reading extracts from some of their favourite books about the Second World War. Today James is reading an extract from Anthony

In part two of their conversation with historian Guy Walters, Al Murray and James Holland explore how the Second world War is viewed in Britain as the nation’s defining myth. Nationalism and political identity are also key themes of their

In the second part of Al Murray and James Holland’s conversation with historian Phillips O’Brien they discuss the largely forgotten US Admiral William Leahy and his attitude to the use of the atomic bomb in Japan.