Date: Tuesday 4th July
Venue: Hatchards, Piccadilly
Time: 6.30pm
Booking: Details to follow
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, prize-winning biographer of Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll, fell into a looking-glass world of his own one day when unsteadiness and a sudden fall pitched him down a trapdoor into the world of the chronically unwell. Diagnosed with primary progressive multiple sclerosis, he felt his body was slowly ‘dying like a coral reef’ until the chance to take part in a clinical drugs trial offered a glimmer of hope – and he grasped it. An extreme treatment, requiring extreme stoicism and the complete isolation that others were later to experience with the pandemic.
His treatment recalibrated not just his immune system but his relationships with people, with his surroundings, with his world. The biographer now turned memoirist, and Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces is the result, a compulsively readable voyage around our expectations of life, and what happens when they are curbed by illness.
He will be in conversation with Jane Ridley, celebrated biographer of Edward Lutyens, Queen Victoria, Edward VII and George V, and chair of the Biographers’ Club.