One understands his mistrust of the demeaning face of pity, and mistrusts it, recognising that it is mingled with the fear that the horror might happen to you. As he says to his students at the end of his introductory lecture at the beginning of each academic year, literature is not a mirror, rather it is ‘a lens we could use to refocus our understanding of the world. AHSCT cannot repair existing damage to the brain and spinal cord, but up to 70% of patients with primary progressive MS who undergo it are able to halt the disease’s development. Thanks to a faulty immune system response, the nerve cells of someone with MS are gradually stripped of their protective myelin sheaths, which means they can no longer carry instructions from the brain to the rest of the body without some of this information being lost along the way.

And though his book of diary entries charts depths to which Douglas-Fairhurst doesn’t sink, it’s also gloriously life-affirming, “embracing the sheer multiplicity of the world”. He has bought himself a whizzy, state-of-the-art wheelchair, which may yet be deployed in the summer, heat being “kryptonite” for his MS. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. This memoir documents his experience of illness since then, but also ranges back over his earlier life. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer View image in fullscreen ‘My body was like a dying coral reef’ … Robert Douglas-Fairhurst.No one would be able to enter his room without first disinfecting themselves in a decontamination area. But even as he read, and took solace in that reading, there was no ignoring the fact that his own disease was developing rapidly, symptoms that had previously been content to remain in the background now thrusting themselves wholeheartedly upon him. It was a shuffling in his legs that had made Douglas-Fairhurst seek medical advice – and now a neurologist confirmed the worst.

His books include Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist , which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland , which was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award, and The Turning Point: A Year that Changed Dickens and the World .It's partly an act of defiance, creating a written narrative out of a bodily narrative over which he feels no control. M, too, was sanguine about what might lie ahead – Douglas-Fairhurst carefully outlined a series of increasingly grim scenarios, beginning with whether M would be willing to cut his toenails for him – and he was also funny about it, ready to take the piss. This is a beautifully written memoir- the story of a devastating diagnosis but it is so much more than that.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Metamorphosis is the best book I have read about multiple sclerosis, and that is because it is about so much more. When a trapdoor opened in Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s life – the abrupt diagnosis, in his 40s, of multiple sclerosis – he couldn’t help thinking of Gregor in Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a young man who’s changed into a giant beetle, imprisoned in bed, legs waving feebly in the air. The Journal of a Disappointed Manis a memoir, first published in 1919, by the naturalist Bruce Cummings under the pseudonym WNP Barbellion.The early part of the book answers that, harking back to his south London childhood, lanky teenage awkwardness and love of acting (“being myself was much easier when I was pretending to be someone else”). We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from.