Terminal illness

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Provocative, verbose and humourless: Mrs Warren’s Profession reviewed

George Bernard Shaw’s provocative play Mrs Warren’s Profession examines the moral hypocrisy of the moneyed classes. It opens with a brilliant young graduate, Vivie Warren, boasting about her dazzling achievements as a mathematician at Newnham College, Cambridge. She explains her future plans to a pair of mild-mannered chaps who clearly adore her. Like most of Shaw’s characters, Vivie is hard-nosed, emotionally cold, incapable of speaking concisely and boundlessly self-confident. Quite irritating, in other words. She plans to start a firm with another hyper-brainy female and to make a killing in the London insurance market. This occurs in 1902. Was it normal for two unmarried Edwardian women to enter the world

Tuesday

Leyla Sanai

A war reporter bravely faces death – but not from sniper fire

When you are a foreign correspondent and have covered wars in dozens of countries, the last place you’d expect a threat to your life to come from is your own cells. Yet this was the predicament in which the New York Times reporter Rod Nordland found himself in July 2019. Despite close shaves in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Central America and Darfur, he only really became aware of his mortality after collapsing with a seizure in India and discovering the existence of a ‘space occupying lesion’ (SOL) in his brain – a euphemism for a growth, benign or malignant. On transfer to a hospital in Manhattan, Nordland learned that his was