After Martha

Paul Laity, 25 September 2025

... responsible for her proved to be disastrous. A key recommendation arising from the report of the Francis Inquiry into the Mid-Staffs scandal, published in 2013, was that every patient be assigned a ‘responsible consultant/clinician’ and ‘named nurse’, with the names visible at the patient’s bedside; the government sent a directive to every ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... And why weren’t they bringing her and Jeremiah and the others down? Zainab phoned her friend Francis who lived in the next block. ‘The firefighters are here,’ she said. ‘They have told us to stay.’ When he called her back she said Jeremiah had collapsed from the fumes. Francis was standing in the crowd below ...

It’s already happened

James Meek: The NHS Goes Private, 22 September 2011

... an executive vice president at UnitedHealth, one of America’s largest private health companies. Mark Britnell, a career NHS manager who rose to become one of the most powerful civil servants in the department, upped sticks in 2009 to become global head of health for the consultants KPMG. This last move did have the advantage of giving an insight into what ...

Reasons for Liking Tolkien

Jenny Turner: The Hobbit Habit, 15 November 2001

... in 1930, when a 38-year-old professor of Anglo-Saxon and father of four small children sat down to mark some exam scripts. On a blank page he found himself writing this: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ This is still the first sentence of the children’s classic we know.He always said he had no idea where the sentence came from, or what a ...

Bitter Chill of Winter

Tariq Ali: Kashmir, 19 April 2001

... the Lion of Kashmir was released after six years in prison. A million people lined the streets to mark his return: Nehru spoke of the necessity of ending hostilities between India and Pakistan.Kashmir troubled Nehru’s conscience. He met Abdullah in Delhi and told him that he wanted the problem of Kashmir resolved in his lifetime. He suggested that Abdullah ...

Courage, mon amie

Terry Castle: Disquiet on the Western Front, 4 April 2002

... diaries; reread Testament of Youth (in a single great dollop); then turned to Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge’s excellent Brittain biography of 1995. Before I knew it I was up to my ears again in Great War matériel, but this time with a difference. I was getting a weensy bit more honest. To confess in public that you are afraid of death – and violent ...

Day 5, Day 9, Day 16

LRB Contributors: On Ukraine, 24 March 2022

... cronies. Jeremy HardingThe​  total number of Ukrainians on the move has passed the two million mark. The figure is rising. Before the Russians invaded, the UNHCR put the Ukrainian diaspora worldwide at roughly six million, the great majority in Europe. Just under twenty thousand of those were in France, where figures for new arrivals are also on the ...

The Uncommon Reader

Alan Bennett, 8 March 2007

... concern her staff, her family were actually rather relieved. She had always kept them up to the mark and age had not made her more indulgent. Reading, though, had. She left the family more to themselves, chivvied them hardly at all and they had an easier time all round. Hurray for books was their feeling, except when they were required to read them or when ...