‘History doesn’t record itself’

The world has changed, thank God. But the world still has Aids.

My book about the early history of Aids in Britain went out of print a while ago, and I’m delighted Faber has reissued it. The publication coincides with the 40th anniversary of the first reported Aids case in the UK, and a sense that we may be running the last miles of a brutal race.

The book is now a time capsule. I haven’t touched a word of it. The first edition opened with an origin story, the tale of what may have been the first British case of HIV in a seafarer who fell unwell and then died in Manchester in 1959. The story was always scientifically problematic, and has since been disproved by genetic coding, and so I have excised it. But apart from that, everything holds true, or at least consistent. This was the story then.

Reading it again, I can see oversights and omissions, and I regret being a little too cynical at times, but I’m proud of the anger it contains, and I still feel indebted to those who helped me write it. I hope someone close to the story will one day bring the narrative up to date.   

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