Throughout the whole of my life after Hornsey, I have continued with ‘art’ in one form or another; either producing posters, ceramics, photographs, prints or drawings.

 

 I think that I will continue to write about health, science and vested interests and consider this an important part of post industrial politics. I remain committed to the emergent health freedom movement and opposed to the medical monopoly which has power in Europe and North America.

 

 

Influences

 

 

From the early seventies, after I drifted into writing with my first book about homeless youth in the West End, I had a very fixed idea about being an ‘activist writer’. In fact I always convinced myself that once I stopped being politically active I would also stop writing. Now, in my late fifties, while no longer so active but very much in love with writing, I find this early promise impossible to keep.

 

Despite finding it hard work, I like writing but think that we don´t pay enough attention to style in the kind of investigative writing which I have always done. I wish there were investigative writers or even reviewers who talked to each other about style. Usually this kind of discussion is reserved for creative writers and producers of ‘literature’.

 

I am interested in writing which links sociological investigation with journalism and I am particularly attracted to the North American muckrakers, who challenged powerful interests with good investigative prose in the early part of the twentieth century. In the 1990s, the number of really good investigative writers/ activists has proliferated massively. It is now almost impossible not to be stunned, impressed and influenced at every turn, just in my area, by writers such as Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, Barbara Seaman, Jonathan Harr, Sandra Steingraber or Liane Clorfene-Casten.

 

Before this sudden blossoming of the form, I had been most influenced by Janet Malcolm, to the point at which I could think of no better writer. Also, Paul Foot, Paul Brodeur, Rachel Carson, and a Judith Okely. Modern movements are particularly bad at giving credence to their history; in relation to the Health Freedom movement, I think it is important to be cogniscent of the writings of, Christopher Bird, Morris Bealle, Hans Ruesch, Howard S. Berliner, Fritjof Capra, Harris L. Coulter, Samuel Epstein , John Lauritsen,