Osler’s Razor

Peter Medawar, 17 February 1983

The Youngest Science 
by Lewis Thomas.
Viking, 256 pp., $14.75, February 1983, 9780670795338
Show More
Show More
... of all the doctors themselves ... my father’s colleagues lived from month to month on whatever cash their patients provided and did a lot of their work free, not that they wanted to or felt any conscious sense of charity, but because that was the way it was.’ These are considerations to keep in mind; and when, in countries lacking a national health ...

Into the Underworld

Iain Sinclair: The Hackney Underworld, 22 January 2015

... your home as a volatile asset. The canny speculator should be alert for the optimum moment to cash in. Three-bed flats are on offer at £750,000. The average rent in the street is calculated at £1666 per month. Inspired by this febrile vision, householders dig. There are seven basement excavations in progress. Wilberforce Road is unlisted and schemes for ...

Erasures

Colm Tóibín: The Great Irish Famine, 30 July 1998

... its demolition in 1941 was a disgrace.Augusta Persse was born in 1852, and in 1880 she married Sir William Gregory, who was 35 years older than her. He died in 1892, and she outlived him by forty years. Lady Gregory made herself useful to Yeats, as Roy Foster shows in his biography of the poet, because of her interest in folklore and her knowledge of the area ...

What I heard about Iraq in 2005

Eliot Weinberger: Iraq, 5 January 2006

... that there were 3200 prisoners in Abu Ghraib, 700 more than its capacity. I heard Major General William Brandenburg, who oversees US military detention operations in Iraq, say: ‘We’ve got a normal capacity and a surge capacity. We’re operating at surge capacity.’ A year before, I had heard the President promise ‘to demolish the Abu Ghraib ...

A Strange Blight

Meehan Crist: Rachel Carson’s Forebodings, 6 June 2019

‘Silent Spring’ and Other Writings on the Environment 
by Rachel Carson, edited by Sandra Steingraber.
Library of America, 546 pp., £29.99, March 2018, 978 1 59853 560 0
Show More
Show More
... of plants and animals, including humans, altering our genes and causing cancer. As she wrote to William Shawn, her editor at the New Yorker, where her book was serialised before its publication, ‘I have a comforting feeling that what I shall now be able to achieve is a synthesis of widely scattered facts, that have not heretofore been considered in ...

Abolish the CIA!

Chalmers Johnson: ‘A classic study of blowback’, 21 October 2004

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to 10 September 2001 
by Steve Coll.
Penguin, 695 pp., $29.95, June 2004, 1 59420 007 6
Show More
Show More
... it up, just go out there and kill Soviets.’ These orders came from a most peculiar American. William Casey, the CIA’s director from January 1981 to January 1987, was a Catholic Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits. Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his mansion, called ‘Maryknoll’, on Long Island. He attended mass daily and urged Christianity on ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Where I was in 1993, 16 December 1993

... wildly gesticulating husband.The person who is really shown up by the story is, of course, me.Tony Cash tells me that he saw A Lady of Letters done on French TV. When Miss Ruddock is watching the young couple who live opposite her she remarks: ‘The couple opposite just having their tea. No cloth on. Milk bottle stuck there, waiting.’ This has been ...

Flailing States

Pankaj Mishra: Anglo-America Loses its Grip, 16 July 2020

... Service was created; when welfare projects like Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which promised cash benefits for all families in need, were launched; and when civil rights legislation was introduced with one nervous eye on Soviet propagandists, who tirelessly and irrefutably pointed to the organised degradation of African Americans in the US.Such small ...

The Chief Inhabitant

Diarmaid MacCulloch: Jerusalem, 14 July 2011

Jerusalem: The Biography 
by Simon Sebag Montefiore.
Weidenfeld, 638 pp., £25, January 2011, 978 0 297 85265 0
Show More
Show More
... to YouTube to revisit the recent royal wedding, and the communal singing of a peculiar poem by William Blake that has gained national anthem status. It was not much thought of until it acquired a splendid musical setting, an inspired piece of bombast by Sir Hubert Parry; ever since, the English have much enjoyed noisily pledging that they will not cease ...

Who removed Aristide?

Paul Farmer, 15 April 2004

... law, this debt need not be repaid. Yet in order to meet the renewed demands of the IDB, the cash-strapped Haitian government was required to pay ever-expanding arrears on its debts, many of them linked to loans paid out to the Duvalier dictatorship and to the military regimes that ruled Haiti with great brutality from 1986 to 1990. In July 2003, Haiti ...

What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking

Jackson Lears: #Russiagate, 4 January 2018

... GPS to unearth any connections between Trump and Russia. The assignment involved the payment of ‘cash for trash’, as the Clinton campaign liked to say. Fusion GPS eventually produced the trash, a lurid account written by the former British MI6 intelligence agent Christopher Steele, based on hearsay purchased from anonymous Russian sources. Amid prostitutes ...

A Revision of Expectations

Richard Horton: Notes on the NHS, 2 July 1998

The National Health Service: A Political History 
by Charles Webster.
Oxford, 233 pp., £9.99, April 1998, 0 19 289296 7
Show More
Show More
... moment of bipartisanship: in the 50-year history of the NHS, there hasn’t been another like it. William Beveridge’s 300-page report, Social Insurance and Allied Service, was submitted in November 1942. By the end of 1944, it had sold over 200,000 copies. It had been commissioned with postwar reconstruction in mind and was to lead to one of this ...

Good Activist, Bad Activist

Adam Mars-Jones: ACT UP grows up, 29 July 2021

Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-93 
by Sarah Schulman.
Farrar, Straus, 736 pp., £30.99, June, 978 0 374 18513 8
Show More
Show More
... memories of the Nuremberg Trials by envisioning a future in which figures like Cardinal Ratzinger, William F. Buckley Jr and Jesse Helms would be held to account for the hatefulness of their pronouncements about people with Aids. ACT UP New York was founded in March 1987, but perhaps sparked as much as founded, thanks to the now-or-never rhetoric of the ...

Those Brogues

Marina Warner, 6 October 2016

... lacing and a short tongue. How did Esmond pay for the brogues? It wasn’t a question of cash, though he wasn’t particularly flush, because all shoes were an extravagance in the immediate postwar period, when rationing was at its most stringent: a mingy 24 coupons a year were allowed for clothing, compared to 66 during the war itself; the ticket ...

One, Two, Three, Eyes on Me!

George Duoblys, 5 October 2017

... was there, the idea was to knock the whole thing down and start again, using central government cash and private sponsorship.The best-known of the schools built as part of New Labour’s ‘Academies’ programme is Mossbourne Community Academy, less than a mile away from City, which was built on the site of Hackney Downs School. A grammar school turned ...