Gavin Francis

It is estimated that five hundred million people contracted it, and that between fifty and a hundred million of them died. Asians were thirty times more likely to die than Europeans. The pandemic had some influence on the lives of everyone alive today. Donald Trump’s grandfather Friedrich died from it in New York City. He was 49. His early death meant that his fortune passed to his son Fred, who used it to start a New York property empire.

‘The patient stated that he had known he was a cat since this secret was imparted to him by the family cat, who subsequently taught him “cat language”,’ the psychiatrists wrote. He held down a normal job, all the while ‘he lived with cats, had sexual activity with them, hunted with them, and frequented cat night spots in preference to their human equivalent.’ The psychiatrists had little hope for improvement – his belief had persisted despite various trials of antidepressants, anticonvulsants, antipsychotics and six years of psychotherapy. ‘His greatest – but unrequited – love was for a tigress in the local zoo,’ they concluded. ‘He hoped one day to release her.’

An​ apnoea is a cessation of breathing. When sufferers of sleep apnoea enter deep sleep, their airway becomes blocked by the tissues around their throat. They may gasp for air, and stir hundreds of times a night to a level just below conscious awareness. People with sleep apnoea wake up in the morning feeling as if they’ve slept normally, but are chronically tired because their sleep...

Management consultant initiatives and stealth privatisations have for years set about the NHS like termites, nibbling away at the beams and struts of a once magnificent structure. But the whole edifice is now on the brink of collapse. If the principles of the NHS are to be defended, we will have to find more money.

A detective inspector​ once told me that the key thing to remember at a crime scene was to keep your hands in your pockets; the temptation to reach out and touch a murder victim, or a potential murder weapon, could be overwhelming. He had little faith in forensic pathologists. ‘I was at a scene where a dead man lay slumped over a desk,’ he told me. ‘There was a...