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This episode takes a walk, but a very short one. That's because my companion is Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, professor of English at Magdalen College, Oxford, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2017. The disease has wrecked his capacity to walk more than a few hundred metres - and wonky, clumsy metres at that. But Robert has substituted physical walks with imaginative ones, scanning his mind for ways of reading himself through literature. His powerful, funny and frank memoir Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces is a sparkling demonstration of the places our minds can take us when our feet can't.
By Charlie Lee-Potter5
11 ratings
This episode takes a walk, but a very short one. That's because my companion is Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, professor of English at Magdalen College, Oxford, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2017. The disease has wrecked his capacity to walk more than a few hundred metres - and wonky, clumsy metres at that. But Robert has substituted physical walks with imaginative ones, scanning his mind for ways of reading himself through literature. His powerful, funny and frank memoir Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces is a sparkling demonstration of the places our minds can take us when our feet can't.

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