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. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Makes you appreciate that having a curious intellect is vital if you are to lead a happy life when your physical strength and mobility is so restricted.

Metamorphosis is the best book I have read about multiple sclerosis , and that is because it is about so much more.It allows you a critical vantage point, enabling you to understand the illness from the inside and the outside simultaneously. 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. It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance. My eyes, for instance, have settled down in the last couple of years, which for me is hugely significant. Reading someone like him, who goes through a worse version of what I’m going through, is a form of homeopathy,” he says.

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.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. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer View image in fullscreen ‘My body was like a dying coral reef’ … Robert Douglas-Fairhurst.

What’s eerie about this in retrospect (and anyone who reads his book, the first literary account of such a procedure, is bound to feel it) is the way that his isolation – a long pause attended by many masks and gowns – prefigured the pandemic, which would arrive only months later. In his lovely, book-lined room in Magdalen College, Oxford – open a window, and you may hear the sound of a deer coughing in the mist – Douglas-Fairhurst, a fiftysomething professor of English whose studies of Lewis Carroll and Charles Dickens have won literary prizes, and who has acted as the historical consultant on, among other productions, the TV series Dickensian and the Enola Holmesfilms, gamely waves an ankle at me. The white lesions revealed by his MRI scan suggested it was likely his central nervous system had already suffered permanent damage. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed.I don’t want to be too Pollyanna about this, but it’s better to be grateful for what you can do than to pine for what you can’t.

it persuasively builds the case for the ability of stories to offer hope and solace; to help us become ourselves, over and over, even in extremis.A darkly comic and moving memoir on what it means to be human in a world where nothing is certain, from the award-winning Oxford professor. And part of the agenda here, no doubt, is to make readers just a little more aware of MS (which clearly has a history of misrepresentation) - whichever passport they currently hold.