But he knows there are few better places in which to be ill than an Oxford college (he has been at Magdalen for 20 years). Metamorphosis is the best book I have read about multiple sclerosis, and that is because it is about so much more. The last thing you want is well-intentioned but unhelpful advice, when everyone becomes Google doctor. His symptoms – the struggle to get out of a hot bath; the feeling, after a long walk, that his legs could no longer carry him – had hitherto been more bothersome than distressing or painful.

As it turned out, the second scenario was closer to the truth, but at the time it was difficult to be suitably terrified because I simply didn’t know what, exactly, I was scared of. 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.The book ought to be gruelling and it doesn’t shrink from candour about the trials of MS – the pain, anxiety, shame and self-pity, and the thoughts of ending them at Dignitas.

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. 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. Metamorphosis is the best book I have read about multiple sclerosis , and that is because it is about so much more.

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).

Students, he says, tend to think of dons as aliens: “The fact that I was stumbling and slurring probably struck them as just another example of academic weirdness. The white lesions revealed by his MRI scan suggested it was likely his central nervous system had already suffered permanent damage.What I needed was laughter,’ Douglas-Fairhurst says, and later, ‘the worst was not, so long as I could still look at it with a comic squint.

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. Biography: Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Magdalen College. 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”. His partner, M, set the right example: rather than maunder or end the relationship, he lightened the air with jokes. 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.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. Too often, us middle-aged blokes with PPMS (the one that just gets progressively worse) get forgotten amidst the mass swirl of the c. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Magdalen College. His MS has, you see, changed his relationship with his body in ways that are – unlikely as this may sound – good as well as bad.