Health
The reason middle-class parents are so anxious
On that record-breaking, sweltering day at the end of July, my three-year-old son did a pirouette in the paddling pool…
Proton therapy: Cancer revolution or costly white elephant?
It’s Asco week in Chicago: the biggest meeting of clinical oncologists in the world. McCormick Place convention centre, the largest…
My medical treatment is sending me bonkers – and it’s no fun
If I’ve been incredibly rude to you or snappy or tearful lately, if I’ve taken offence where none was intended,…
![British poet Salena Godden presenter of Mrs Death Misses Death on Radio 4. [Photo: Roberto Ricciuti / Getty Images]](https://spectatorau.imgix.net/content/uploads/2018/12/Radio.jpg?auto=compress,enhance,format&crop=faces,entropy,edges&fit=crop&w=410&h=275)
Listening to people talking about death can be strangely consoling
‘Without death,’ says Salena Godden, ‘life would be a never-ending conveyor belt of sensation.’ For her death is what gives…
How does anyone manage to navigate the maze of our second-rate NHS?
Next month the National Health Service turns 70. The institution is greatly loved, and not for nothing. The fear of…
Farewell to a bottle and a half per day – I have finally embarked on a diet
Are there still travelling fairs? In many villages, they used to be part of the annual round. For weeks, the…
I’d rather be fat-shamed than have cancer
Sofie Hagen is a young Danish comic I admire. I didn’t see her most recent show, Dead Baby Frog, but…
Nine reasons to be cheerful this year
Since it’s the first week of the New Year I’m going to pretend the bad stuff isn’t happening and focus…
Dr Google’s verdict? Anthrax poisoning
Six months into the renovations and I have so much dust in my lungs I have had to give Stefano…
A book about sleep that will keep you up all night
I’ve read several books about sleep recently, and their authors all tell me the same three things. The first is…
Health and personal choice
Public health specialist Sir Michael Marmot has blamed ‘the cuts’ for the rise in dementia among the elderly, resulting in…
Stop lecturing fatties – it’s really not their fault
I’ve noticed for some time now that thin people, genuinely slim ones, have a secret loathing of fatties. Kindly though…
Smokers are paying for your pension
Axa will no longer invest in the tobacco industry: the French insurance giant will sell €184 million of shares and…
Warning: rationality could be bad for your health
Almost every popular commercial product owes its success to two different qualities. First, it does the job it is ostensibly…
The vaping craze isn’t about nicotine. It’s about gadgets
Probably you never visited the flats of middle-class student drug dealers in the 1990s, because crikey, neither did I, and…
I used to back Jeremy Hunt’s digital NHS plan. Now I know it’s a disaster
My baby and I excel at blood tests. He (tiny, jaundiced) stretches out naked under the hospital’s hot cot-lamps like…
Books aren’t medicine. They’re more powerful than that
Who can forget the terrible climax of Howards End, when Leonard Bast is killed by a deluge of books? Death…
It’s not work that’s stressful. It’s offices
In the 1920s, the anthropologist Margaret Mead studied the people of New Guinea. She noticed that they hunted birds and…
After 50 years, I’m out of the agony-aunt business
It’s clear that Vladimir Putin has had a facelift, which might explain why Wendi Deng would take an interest in…
How Seneca got to sleep
As if we did not have enough to cause us sleepless nights, the Royal Society for Public Health has demanded…
Hate tax havens? Try imagining a world without them
However wicked tax evasion is and however distasteful some tax avoidance may be, people should imagine a world without tax…
An old man’s guide to living dangerously
As an old man, well past my Biblical sell-by date, I cannot for the life of me understand why increased…
A dispatch from a family of fooshers
I’d like this to have been one of those Spectator diaries that gives the ordinary reader a glimpse into the…
I adore sport. I can no longer stomach boxing. Here’s why
In the course of a queasy hour in Harley Street 30 years ago I learned a great deal about the…
The scan said my baby wouldn’t live. It was wrong
When my unborn baby was a five-month-old fetus, twisting about in the internal dark, he was given a death sentence…
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