TY - JOUR T1 - Magic JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 962 LP - 962 DO - 10.3399/bjgp09X473376 VL - 59 IS - 569 AU - James Willis Y1 - 2009/12/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/59/569/962.abstract N2 - Arthur C. Clarke's much-quoted third law of prediction, ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’, of 1973,1 was anticipated in 1928 by Virginia Woolf. Here is the reaction of her eponymous character Orlando on entering the lift in Marshall & Snelgrove's, Oxford Street, ‘for the good reason that the door was open’ and finding herself ‘shot smoothly upwards’:‘The very fabric of life now, she thought as she rose, is magic. In the 18th century we knew how everything was done; but here I rise through the air; I listen to voices in America; I see men flying — but how it's done I can't even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns’.2In this spoof biography Orlando is unusual, not to say magical, in having been born during … ER -