Thanks for your critique, Janet. We actually tried a couple of episodes where House (Hugh Laurie) (please put the brackets in the right place) gets it right first time, but they were only 6 minutes long. NBC weren’t happy. Then we tried some where House never gets it right and the patient dies. The audience wasn’t happy.
One could apply your trenchant analysis to other art forms: JS Bach wrote 30 Goldberg variations on the same chord structure; Frida Kahlo painted 50 portraits of herself; Henry Moore, what??
The point is, or was, variations on a theme; if all you see is hospital, medical blah blah, then it wasn’t meant for you.
Nonetheless, I look forward to your first novel!
It's very disappointing that shouting and pulling silly stunts rather than engaging in reasoned discussion is still being permitted to shut down teaching and learning in a leading UK university.
Due to escalating disruptive protests, I have decided to cancel the remainder of these lectures. This is deeply lamentable, but the disruption has undermined the academic nature of this series. Students shouldn't face bullying or harassment when attending academic events.
It is unfortunate that these protesters have chosen disruption over genuine intellectual engagement grounded in academic charity and rigour. In attempting to shame students into deplatforming these lectures, they manifest the antithesis of what a university stands for.
Of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Clark may have paid the highest personal price. Almost nobody knows his story. Buckle up.
He was a New Jersey farm kid considered too frail for farm work, so he taught himself math, then surveying, then law. He never got rich from it because he kept defending poor farmers who could not pay him. His neighbors called him "the Poor Man's Counselor."
In the early hours of July 4, 1776, while Congress debated independence in Philadelphia, Clark wrote a letter to a friend with one of the most chilling lines of the Revolution: "Perhaps our Congress will be exalted on a high gallows."
He signed anyway.
Then the British made it personal. Two of his sons were officers in the Continental Army, and both were captured. They were thrown onto the prison ship Jersey in New York Harbor, the deadliest place of the entire war. More Americans died on British prison ships than in every battle of the Revolution combined.
One son got it even worse. He was locked in the dungeon and given no food except what other starving prisoners could push through the keyhole of his cell.
The British reportedly offered Clark a deal: renounce the Declaration, switch sides, and your boys go free.
He refused.
Here is the part that breaks me. Clark sat in Congress through all of it and never once brought it up. No special pleading, no favors. Congress only found out through other channels and threatened retaliation against a British officer, which finally got his son out of the dungeon.
After the war, he kept choosing the little guy. He fought for debt relief for struggling farmers and refused to support the Constitution until he was assured a Bill of Rights would protect ordinary citizens.
In September 1794, at age 68, the self-taught surveyor who outlasted the British Empire died of sunstroke after a long day working on his own farm.
No statue on the National Mall. No musical. Just a small town in New Jersey called Clark, and most people who drive through it have no idea why.
Some men signed the Declaration with ink. Abraham Clark signed it with his sons.
Que partida memorável. O lindo gol de Sócrates, Hegel e Kant correndo para refutar, Confúcio impassível na arbitragem, o júbilo final dos clássicos e pré-socráticos.
My granddad is the best person i know
At 11, he tried a cig and didn't like it and never smoked since
At 18, he was on the verge of death from sepsis when his mom's friend's husband, a long haul Aeroflot pilot, brought penicillin back from the US. When the antibiotics started working, the doc told his mom - don't cry, he might even live up to 40
At 21, he got a degree in nuclear physics, but wasn't allowed to work in the industry due to weakened health. He found himself in the Soviet space programme
At 26, he sent Sputnik to space, a few weeks before he had his first child
At 32, he made the discovery of the Earth's plasmasphere
At 60, he learnt English because the iron curtain had fallen and he could travel to the international space conferences. He needed to write and present in English
At 70, he would fight me for the dial-up internet as I wanted to chat to online friends, while he needed to send some work emails from home
At 85, he visited me in London and went to the British Museum five days in a row. One of the days we were having afternoon tea, and he exclaimed: "I'm so lucky! Had I not lived to this age, I would not have seen Amenkhotep III statue and had these wonderful scones at the Ritz"
At 90, he was the only person in my family who said I must absolutely take the opportunity to work in crypto
At 94, he still was still co-authoring scientific papers. And this hasn't stopped yet
Yesterday, he turned 95
Happy birthday granddad 😊
It’s a poor show when no ScotGov minister will face the media after our Parliament has voted for another independence referendum. The scandal and corruption at the heart of @theSNP must be addressed before the cause of independence can advance. We need an independent inquiry.
In 1943, the Gestapo finally caught Raymond Aubrac — one of France's most wanted Resistance leaders. He was sentenced to death. His execution was days away.
His wife Lucie was six months pregnant.
Most people would have hidden. Would have grieved quietly and prayed for a miracle. Lucie Aubrac did something else entirely. She obtained forged identity papers, constructed a cover story, and walked straight into the office of Klaus Barbie — the man history would remember as the Butcher of Lyon — and convinced him to grant her a visit with the condemned man.
She wasn't there to say goodbye.
She was memorizing guard positions. Counting minutes. Mapping the route the prison truck would take.
On October 21, 1943, that truck rolled through the streets of Lyon carrying Raymond and other prisoners toward what should have been the end. Lucie had spent weeks quietly assembling a team of Resistance fighters, planning an ambush with the precision of a military operation. When the truck reached the ambush point, the team struck — fast, coordinated, and without hesitation.
In the chaos of gunfire and confusion, Raymond Aubrac was pulled free.
Lucie — visibly, unmistakably pregnant — had organized every detail of his liberation.
They went into hiding. Weeks later, Lucie gave birth to their daughter in a safe house while German forces searched for them across France. When liberation finally came, the Aubracs didn't merely survive — they rebuilt.
Raymond became a celebrated engineer and entered public life. Lucie became a historian, pouring decades into ensuring that the women of the French Resistance — so often unnamed, so easily forgotten — were written permanently into the record. They raised three children. They traveled the world. They argued and laughed and grew old together.
When journalists asked Lucie, years later, what had compelled her to risk everything that October day, she didn't hesitate.
"He was my husband. What else would I do?"
Lucie Aubrac passed away in 2007 at the age of 94. Raymond — who had once needed a commando team to be freed from a German prison — lived on until 2012, reaching 97 years old. In his final years, he continued speaking publicly about the Resistance, about memory, about the obligation to tell the truth.
They had been married for 64 years.
Not a love story built on grand gestures or perfect circumstances. A love story built in occupied France, in safe houses and forged documents and a prison truck ambush on a Lyon street — forged in fire, and never broken.
True love doesn't wait for rescue. Sometimes, it does the rescuing
Iranian hairstylist Ami Moghadam received death threats for posting videos of women receiving haircuts on Instagram.
So she decided to troll the Islamic Regime and their oppressive mandatory hijab laws in the most epic, hilarious way possible. 😂