The End of Innocence -
Britain in the Time of Aids
About the Book
It is often hard to remember or explain
quite how an idea for a book began, but this one is
simple. In
April 1993 I wanted to write an article for the Independent
on Sunday about the history of the Aids drug AZT. The
drug, once the only great hope for people with HIV,
had been the subject of a very disappointing trial
result in the Lancet, and I was keen to write something
that would chart its various fortunes over the past
few years and explain its significance. There were
various pieces of information, but nothing that placed
it in a wider context of HIV science. Wellcome, the
company that made it, was nervous of the press. Furthermore,
there was nothing that talked about the history of
Aids in Britain in accessible, general terms. So I
wrote the AZT article, and then composed the outline
for this book.
It is an attempt to explain the personal, social and
political elements of Aids in Thatcher’s Britain,
and to weave these elements into a framework of personal
testimony, jargon-free medical analysis and journalistic
reporting.
I tried to keep a positive outlook, and was ever in thrall to the doctors,
patients and campaigners who agreed to help me. The book was criticized in
some quarters for having no particular angle on the disease (which was precisely
what I wanted to avoid). But on the whole it was welcomed. It was made into
a BBC2 film for the Storyville strand, won a Somerset Maugham Award, and
sold quite well considering its subject matter. The book
was written before the
major treatment breakthrough provided by protease inhibitors, which for many
promised a greatly extended life and the possibility of treating Aids as
a chronic illness rather than a death sentence. Since
them, the medical science
has been refined further still. The book defines the UK experience, and we
know the situation in much of the rest of the world to be far worse.
The brief
extract here is taken from the third chapter of the
book, and the audio clip (read by Alex Lowe) concerns
Health
Secretary Norman Fowler saying
the word ‘condom’. In the Journalism section there is also a
longer article about the first 20 years of Aids which appeared in the Observer,
and
an interview with the filmmaker Derek Jarman six months before he died. I
miss Derek, and all the other people in the book who are no longer around.
