James Meek

In October 1971 a Soviet scientist flew over the burning land around Hanoi, his passenger jet given a safe corridor by Phantom fighters from the air force that was busy laying waste to the countryside. Three days after arriving in the North Vietnamese capital he and his colleagues were taken to a site in the deep jungle. There, in the searing tropical heat, at the end of a track called the Path of the Cockerel, they saw a perfect miniature replica of their own workplace, Lenin’s mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow. Inside, under a glass cover, was the embalmed corpse of Ho Chi Minh, two years dead, dressed in a white suit.

There is something reassuringly democratic about the maggot nurseries our bodies become if they are left in the open, or in a shallow grave. The insects make no distinctions of race, rank, sex, age or wealth. We’re just a place for them to grow up and feed. It’s more than humbling: it’s heartening – we’re organic, too, and in the end nature recovers the meals we’ve taken from it, by eating us back.

In 1853 the Reverend Frederick Morris, an opponent of Charles Darwin’s and a man with a Victorian sense of propriety, urged his parishioners to emulate the fidelity of a small bird called the dunnock. Be thou like the dunnock, he told them – the female and the male impeccably faithful to each other.

What would the Rev. Morris have made of the scandalous truth? Far from being...

Last September, the Royal Society organised a conference to discuss Edward Hooper’s book The River, which promoted the theory that HIV was accidentally spread to humans from chimpanzees through a polio vaccination programme in Africa in the 1950s. Coincidentally, or not, on the eve of the conference, a British TV channel screened the 1995 Hollywood thriller Outbreak, starring Dustin...

In 1917, a pair of teenagers who had lied about their ages to join an ambulance unit destined for the Western Front found themselves in the same training camp in Sound Beach, Connecticut. One of them was Walt Disney. The other, only 15 years old, was Ray Kroc, the man who later made McDonald’s an empire. When Kroc and his comrades went off to the nearest town on furlough to look for...