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. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed.

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. It's partly an act of defiance, creating a written narrative out of a bodily narrative over which he feels no control. 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.This is a very honest account of MS and it is clear the author has encountered many of the issues which people face.

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 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. 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. 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.Though Samsa is at first cared for by his family, it isn’t long before he becomes a prisoner in his own bedroom, where eventually he dies.

He compares this to coming out as gay as an undergraduate, and says that it was more like a process than an event. Within a couple of minutes, I had begun to run – or more accurately lurch like a panicked giraffe – down the street.

These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. 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. Cummings, who died aged 30, didn’t give the name of his illness but the symptoms are unmistakably those of MS. 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). 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.