It allows you a critical vantage point, enabling you to understand the illness from the inside and the outside simultaneously. An account of living with multiple sclerosis that is both deeply literary and painfully honest as it charts his journey into ill health.

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. Amongst many other devastating reassessments of his life and his place in the world, Douglas-Fairhurst was faced with the question of how to tell family, friends and colleagues what was happening to him. He experienced “bladder urgency”, a condition that affects up to 80% of MS patients; his voice began to grow faint.

He had the latter, with no effective treatment, it seemed, let alone a cure: “My body was like a dying coral reef.

And there is mischievous laughter breezing throughout the book, forbidding any maudlin false sentiment. In the days and weeks after his diagnosis, when things seemed frightening and bleak, Douglas-Fairhurst often thought of poor Gregor. Within a couple of minutes, I had begun to run – or more accurately lurch like a panicked giraffe – down the street. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer View image in fullscreen Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in his room at Magdalen College, Oxford: ‘It’s a community.

But it recalibrated so many other things besides: his relationships with other people, and with his surroundings. The Journal of a Disappointed Manis a memoir, first published in 1919, by the naturalist Bruce Cummings under the pseudonym WNP Barbellion.

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. 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. 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. The electric shocks that ran up and down his spine if he bent his neck forward made him feel as if he was being Tasered at close quarters; in the mornings, his vision was blurred; his legs grew more unpredictable, and his falls more frequent.Other authors include Beckett, Burgess, Joyce, Keats, Tennyson, Heine – among many, many others – and, of course, Kafka – varifocal lenses on other worlds. Not everyone is able to access a timely diagnosis, have a choice of DMTs let alone reach the "holy grail" of stem cell treatment.