Five minutes with . . . Tom Treasure

“My book looks at the ‘heart club,’ a team of London doctors and scientists who, in the late 1940s, took the decision to operate on children with Fallot’s tetralogy, at a time when any kind of heart surgery was contraindicated. The club kept meticulous notes, which sat on the shelves of the cardiology department at Guy’s until I got hold of them when the building was demolished in the 1990s.

“What’s interesting about these notes is that they form a consecutive record, which includes all their failures, disappointments, and frustrations. …