GEOFF BOTTOMS relishes a profoundly human portrait of a family as it evolves across 55 years in Sheffield
Germ of a solution
JOHN GREEN recommends a revelatory account of global pandemics and the ways they can be prevented in future
HARD FACT: Soldiers of French 87th Regiment in their trenches on Hill 304 at Verdun, 1916 - during WWI the average soldier stood more chance of becoming disease fodder than cannon fodder
[National Army Museum/Creative Commons]
PAUL DONOVAN applauds an excellently crafted new musical that explores the life and death of Ruth Ellis
PAUL DONOVAN is tickled by the excruciating take-downs of one of the funniest, wittiest, political writers around.
RON JACOBS points out, via a transcription of Kissinger’s secret recordings, that Trump could never have existed without Nixon and Kissinger
ELLIS RAE is persuaded that the advantages of the ‘talking cure’ are superior to the treatment of mental illness with drugs
JOHN GREEN, MICHAL BONCZA and BELLA KATZ review The Good Boy, Broken English, and Don't Be Prey
New Pandemics, Old Politics: Two Hundred Years of War on Disease and its Alternatives
by Alex de Waal
(Polity Press, £50)
IN NEW Pandemics, Old Politics, Alex de Waal takes to task what he calls the gargantuan error of characterising the current pandemic as the “war on disease.”
When we most need a narrative to make sense of such a devastating pandemic, that epithet “not only fails but also stops us recognising our failures,” he writes.
Reviewing past pandemics such as cholera, so-called Spanish Flu and Aids he demonstrates — alarmingly — how administrative measures taken in response to the virulent Spanish Flu in 1918-19 were almost exactly the same as today.
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