This episode is sponsored by the new Color Revolution exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford,

which looks at how scientific breakthroughs in the Victorian period enable dramatic changes in the use of colour,

in fashion pieces, painting, and other objects. You can hear one of the exhibition's curators,

Charlotte Riberole, who is professor in 19th century British literature at the Sorbonne,

explaining more about the exhibition and some of the objects and ideas it explores

in a special mini episode in our podcast feed.

Music You're listening to the LLB podcast. I'm Malin Hay. Later in this episode, we'll have the next instalment in our series of short conversations with our writers about their favourite pieces by

other writers in the LRB archive. This week, Tom Jones will be talking to Column Tobin,

but before that, joining me this week is Florence Sutcliffe Braithwaite, a historian of 20th century

Britain at UCL, who has written several pieces for the LRB about British cultural history, particularly

in the second

half of that century. In the latest issue, she reviews two books, The Poison Line by Karamagin

and Death in the Blood by Caroline Wheeler, both of which deal with the British infected blood

scandal, the historic case of medical malpractice where in more than a thousand hemophilia patients in the UK,

were accidentally infected with HIV in the 1970s and 80s.

Three quarters of the infected patients have since died.

Along with Florence, I'm also joined by my colleague Tom Crewe, who in 2018 wrote a long

piece for the LRB about the AIDS epidemic, particularly as it affected the lives of gay men at the end of the 20th century. Thank you both so much for joining me today.

Pleasure to be here. Thanks very much. So Florence, I'm going to start with you. So would you just be able to take us through the story of the infected blood scandal? How did it happen? How were 1,200 hemophiliacs in the UK

infected with HIV? So I think actually to understand how so many people with hemophiliat

were infected with HIV, we need to kind of go back and look at what's going on in the 70s

when the kind of the scandal before the HIV scandal was the hepatitis scandal.

...