Most alarming of all, there were moments when he could not think, as if his brain “had been replaced with a lump of warm paste”. 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 . 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. It took him deep into his own mind: his hopes, his fears, his loves and losses, and the books that would sustain, inform and nourish him as his life began to transform in ways he could never have imagined.

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. But now he began to see them as part of a sinister jigsaw: a fiendish puzzle that would, he soon gathered, forever remain unsolvable. It was a shuffling in his legs that had made Douglas-Fairhurst seek medical advice – and now a neurologist confirmed the worst. Yet, as with everything Douglas-Fairhurst does, it's also beautifully written, with great humanity, and wit (occasionally laugh-out-loud funny), and it doesn't dodge the serious business of being at the mercy of one's own increasingly self-defeating body. With everyone in the picture, Douglas-Fairhurst proceeded to do what he has done ever since he was a child: he read furiously, hoping to make sense of the new world in which he found himself.

In that environment you’re just an object to be filled with drugs, and drained, poked, prodded, moved around. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Within a couple of minutes, I had begun to run – or more accurately lurch like a panicked giraffe – down the street. 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.

It allows you a critical vantage point, enabling you to understand the illness from the inside and the outside simultaneously. Finally, as recorded here mostly in journal entries, his arduous treatment began, much of it spent in an antiseptic bubble and with various setbacks along the way. Within weeks, he deteriorated further – had blurred vision for an hour when he woke up, fell over in the street by the Bodleian Library, felt electric shocks tasering his spine if he bent his neck.He struggled to find words that were not ‘ungenerous or ungrateful’ for a Facebook post, which I remember seeing, in which he says that ‘the line between sympathy and pity is one I’m especially keen not to cross. In 2013 he was a Judge of the Man Booker Prize, and in 2015 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Yes, I’d had many months to prepare for the pandemic – and again, this is going to sound holier than thou, but I think it gave me more empathy for people when it began. An account of its author’s experiences of what was then known as “disseminated sclerosis” – Cummings died the year it came out, aged just 30 – it had a powerful effect on Douglas-Fairhurst, one he describes compellingly in Metamorphosis.

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). Above all, he discovered the brilliant naturalist Bruce Cummings, whose book The Journal of a Disappointed Man, published under the pseudonym WNP Barbellion in 1919, becomes a parallel text here, with generous quotations from its diary entries and a heartfelt account of the author’s life. 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 . The Journal of a Disappointed Manis a memoir, first published in 1919, by the naturalist Bruce Cummings under the pseudonym WNP Barbellion.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. For me the funniest moment arises from a wholly unfunny circumstance; one of the symptoms of his condition is urinary ‘urgency’.