With the international lens on Afghanistan, journalist Christina Lamb’s talk on Saturday 13 November about Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women feels very timely. More details about the event here.

Rape and war have a long and painful history, stretching from Alexander the Great through the ‘comfort women’ of the Imperial Japanese Army to the abuse of German women by the Red Army during World War Two. Today, the story hasn’t changed.

Rape is a cruel, insidious and growing part of war, used against hundreds of thousands of women – often as part of barbaric military strategy.

In this searing, angry reckoning of a book – the first major account to address the scale of sexual assault in modern conflict – Lamb exposes the unheard stories of these women with unfailing care and humanity. How in countries around the world rape is used as a weapon. It is also a biting condemnation of the way rape is accepted and ignored.

Lamb is one of Britain’s leading foreign correspondents. She has won 14 major awards including five times being named as Foreign Correspondent of the Year and winning Europe’s top war reporting prize, the Prix Bayeux. She is the author of numerous books including Farewell Kabul, The Africa House, Waiting for Allah, The sewing Circles of Heart and House of Stone. With Malala Yousafzai, she co-wrote the international bestseller I am Malala, and The Girl from Aleppo with Nujeen Mustafa. She is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, an Honorary Fellow of University College, Oxford and was awarded the OBE in 2013.

You can hear her in conversation with Samantha Knights QC, who lives in East Devon and runs the Shute Festival with her partner the writer, Bijan Omran. She specialises in public law and civil liberties and is currently working on refugee, trafficking and modern slavery cases.