When I ended up in hospital with eyes that weren’t focusing properly, that was very scary. My eyes, for instance, have settled down in the last couple of years, which for me is hugely significant. But better wilful legs (and knee pads) than some other things: “The less the body works, the more you appreciate any bit that still does.

His legs, these days, are often obdurate. 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. “For when I fall over.” Has he fallen over a lot lately? “No, but it means that when I do, there’s less chance I’ll end up in A&E.” This sounds so worrying and grave – and yet, he is smiling. “Yes, I’ve started wearing knee pads,” he says.

But what’s this? There’s something… stiff beneath his jeans.

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. Still, he wasn’t about to give up: then, or now. But now he began to see them as part of a sinister jigsaw: a fiendish puzzle that would, he soon gathered, forever remain unsolvable. “There was,” he writes, “a creak of wood, the sharp click of a sliding bolt, and then nothing but the sensation of rushing air.” 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. On that day, a neurologist briskly explained to him that his recent MRI scan had revealed the existence of lesions on his spine and brain that were almost certainly the result of MS, and in that moment – whoosh! – down he plummeted. I n his new book, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst likens his diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in 2017 to the opening of a trapdoor on which he unfortunately happened to be standing “like Wile E Coyote” at the precise moment when the lever operating it was pulled.

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