The whole thing sounds to have been so gruelling and lonely: much more so than I’ve made it sound (you must read his book for the full horror show). Other authors include Beckett, Burgess, Joyce, Keats, Tennyson, Heine – among many, many others – and, of course, Kafka – varifocal lenses on other worlds. 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. At times he felt like Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days, buried up to her neck; or like Prufrock (“how his arms and legs are thin”); or like Robinson Crusoe (“No rest all night, violent pains in my head”).

But, after all that is a socially common response in most people in the presence of serious illness or bereavement. Biography: Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Magdalen College. It really is time that there is a concerted effort by the NHS to level up diagnosis, care and the longer-term options. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. While it was entirely possible that 20 years could go by and I wouldn’t notice any difference, it was also possible it could be the trigger for all kinds of disastrous things happening to my body.Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and an award-wining biographer and critic. What he [Douglas-Fairhurst] gives us isn't just the story of an illness but a story about the importance of stories.

Radio and television appearances include Start the Week and The Culture Show, and he has also acted as the historical consultant on TV adaptations of Jane Eyre, Emma, Great Expectations, the BBC drama series Dickensian, and the feature film Enola Holmes. Since then, one drug has been approved by Nice [the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence], albeit not a very effective one. 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. He was also, thanks to help from his college, able to pay for his treatment, which meant it could happen immediately. Too often, us middle-aged blokes with PPMS (the one that just gets progressively worse) get forgotten amidst the mass swirl of the c.But he is kind and practical and generous, and those are the things you need if you’re ill – and my book, in part, is a love letter to him. As for treatments, though individual symptoms can to a degree be managed, the neurologist could offer no pill that would slow down the progress of the disease, beyond the possibly beneficial effect of taking high doses of vitamin D. A darkly comic and moving reflection on what it means to be human in a world where nothing is certain, from the award-winning Oxford professor'The best book about multiple sclerosis'THE TIMES'An outstanding feat'SUNDAY TIMESWe all have trapdoors in our lives. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer View image in fullscreen ‘My body was like a dying coral reef’ … Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. After his transplant, he would need to remain in an antiseptic bubble until his body started to repair itself with the help of his new stem cells.