Why Lee Child chose Goliath over David

There’s something to be said for “stuffy formality”

The Princess of Wales’s video update on her cancer treatment has been hailed for its “intimate” and “personal” nature, says James Marriott in The Times. “Those qualities strike me as dubious cause for celebration.” It used to be that people in the public eye could have “two distinct selves”: a formal, impersonal self for the public eye, and a more emotional and spontaneous self for close friends and family. Today, we demand access to the “real” self: we approve of public figures who make jokes and embrace their children, and find privacy suspicious. This is seen as a sign of progress; of “freedom from stuffy old-fashioned formality”. But it’s not. The growing obligation to present some idealised version of one’s personal life for everyone else is actually “more like a kind of tyranny” – and it’s becoming “a damaging force in our national life”.

In politics, the expectation that public figures must offer us their whole lives is surely one of the factors that puts talented people off becoming an MP. David Cameron and Gordon Brown, for example, were both “subjected to questioning” about the deaths of their children. Those who do relish endless exposure – the Matt Hancocks, the Meghan Markles – are often “doubtful assets” to national culture. And famous folk aren’t the only ones under the microscope: modern bosses increasingly demand that employees bring their “whole selves” to work; social media is all about presenting versions of your private life for public appreciation. This is not to say the personal sins of politicians should be dismissed as irrelevant. But it wouldn’t hurt to restore the “useful distinction between the public and private”.

The woman who can smell Parkinson’s

Joy Milne has an incredible skill, says Scott Sayare in The New York Times: she can smell diseases. During her long career as a nurse, the 72-year-old from Perth, Scotland used this seemingly superhuman ability unwittingly: when patients had “acetone breath”, she instinctively knew they were about to have a diabetic episode; “wet brown cardboard” meant tuberculosis. One day, her husband Les came home with a new scent that only she could notice – it was “distinctly unsavoury”, thick and musty, and reminded her of her mother-in-law, who had died of Parkinson’s. It wasn’t until decades later, when Les was also diagnosed with Parkinson’s, that she realised she had been smelling the disease. She told some researchers, and they tested her by getting her to sniff 12 smell samples, half from people with Parkinson’s and half without. She correctly categorised every single person, bar one healthy patient. And that patient later turned out to have the disease after all.

Milne is “hypersomic”, a super-smelling condition so under-researched that scientists don’t know what causes it. She often finds scents totally overwhelming: she’ll only drink water that comes from a spring, and crosses the road to escape men’s deodorant. Scientists have determined that the Parkinson’s odour she can smell comes from a substance called sebum, and if they analyse the chemicals in sebum they may be able to diagnose the disease earlier. Now retired, Milne is still using her superlative schnoz to detect diseases from Alzheimer’s to tuberculosis, either in person or with swabs sent in the post. She has twice been flown out to Tanzania to help with TB diagnosis, where one nonprofit uses giant rats to detect the condition. Milne “outsmells them” every time.

👃🩺 Humans have used smell as a diagnostic tool for centuries. The ancient Greeks and Chinese confirmed TB by throwing a patient’s phlegm on hot coals and sniffing the fumes. Typhoid has long been known to smell of baking bread; yellow fever stinks of raw meat; and the metabolic disorder phenylketonuria was discovered because of the “musty smell” it gives urine.

“In summertime, village cricket is the delight of everyone”

Only the English could have invented a summer sport that can’t be played for large chunks of the English summer, says Hugo Gye in The Critic. But for a people with such a fixation on the weather, “cricket seems a perfect fit”. “In summertime, village cricket is the delight of everyone,” wrote Lord Denning in 1977, declaring in a seminal Court of Appeal judgment that homeowners living next to a cricket pitch cannot sue to stop that pitch being used for cricket. “Nearly every village has its own cricket field where the young men play and the old men watch.”

It’s still true: the England and Wales Cricket Board oversees 5,500 clubs, with the final of the Village Cup played at Lord’s. But it is at the lowest level – “where the word ‘amateur’ can truly be used as an insult, not merely a descriptor” – that the cricketing summer takes its finest form. Members of the No 10 cricket team are among many who boast that they have never won a game. (“We shall see if their embrace of happy mediocrity survives the recent change of regime.”) Happily, some things change: cricket is thriving among women and girls, and in many areas it is British Asians keeping the sport alive. But some things remain the same, whoever’s at the crease. Today, as was the case 200 years ago, there are few more magnificent sights than “a cricket pitch towards the end of the day, dappled with the long, spiky shadows of an English summer”.