THIS is more than Britain’s answer to Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On. In The End of Innocence: Britain in the Time of AIDS (Faber and Faber, pp 406, £17.50), Simon Garfield has assembled a fascinating account of the first decade of HIV in Britain which finds its way into ministers’ offices, Edinburgh bars and even the odd jail.
He interviews, among others: Neville Hodgkinson – the journalist then at the Sunday Times, who led a media campaign to argue that HIV does not cause AIDS; Edwina Currie; and the voluntary workers and “ordinary” people directly affected by the arrival of the virus. This is a rare chance to hear how AIDS emerged through the accents of Britain, rather than those of metropolitan America.
