STEVEN ANDREW is moved beyond words by a historical account of mining in Britain made from the words of the miners themselves
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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
CAILEAN MCBRIDE welcomes a refreshing and timely study of the way officialdom creates structures that exclude LGBT+ rights and humanity
The bard mourns the loss of comrades and troubadours, and looks for consolation with Black Country Jess
CHRIS MOSS relishes the painting and the life story of a self-taught working-class artist from Warrington
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a star-studded adaptation of Ibsen’s play that is devoid of believable humanity
GORDON PARSONS is fascinated by a unique dream journal collected by a Jewish journalist in Nazi Berlin
Borrowed Time: Lennon’s Last Decade, Parthenope, Where Dragons Live and Thunderbolts* reviewed by MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE
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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