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An estimated 800,000 people suffer from dementia in Britain. In most cases, it's caused by Alzheimers, a progressive disease that damages the brain. As part of National Dementia Week, ex-cricketer, Ian Botham, recently admitted he had not visited his father in the last six months of his life as he deteriorated from the effects of the disease and Ian didn’t want his memory of his dad to be "distorted by the illness that robbed him of himself". Maggie La Tourelle, author of The Gift of Alzheimers, and Rosemary Westwell, whose husband was diagnosed with early onset dementia over 20 years ago, discuss the pressures and needs of having a parent or a partner in the later stages of dementia.

What is the reality of being a single girl about town in your twenties? For the Telegraph columnist Bryony Gordon, it was a decade of chaos, hangovers, heartbreak and debt, which she shares in her brutally candid memoir, The Wrong Knickers. But does this kind of self deprecating, confessional journalism help anyone? The Observer columnist, Yvonne Roberts, the author of a confessional book about being being young and single in London, Sean Smithson and Bryony Gordon, discuss.

The Wrong Knickers, by Bryony Gordon is published by Headline

How to Lose a Girl in 10  Ways, by Sean Smithson is published by  Matador

In the first in a series about women and swimming we’re in South Wales to meet Catherine Jones. Catherine’s a writer who swims in the sea all year round. Her new novel, Wonder Girls, is based on the exploits of two young women who, in the 1920’s, became the first people to swim across the Bristol Channel from Wales to England. Of course, that’s a remarkably hazardous journey – not something you’d be advised to do today. So Woman’s Hour reporter, Louise Adamson, met up with Catherine at a much safer place for a swim – the seaside resort of Barry Island.

On the 6th of June 1944, over 130,000 Allied soldiers landed on the beaches of Normandy to take back France from the invading Germans. The Resistance movement in France had been crucial in paving the way for the D-Day invasion, and though women played a vital role in Resistance activities their contribution was overlooked in the immediate aftermath of the war. Cécile Rol-Tanguy was among hundreds of women who risked their lives, and without who, she says, the Resistance movement could not have survived. We hear her story, and also talk to Dr Hanna Diamond from the University of Bath about the crucial role French women played in the Resistance.

The  will take place in London on 13-14 June 2014