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“... settled on ‘multiple sclerosis’.Towards the end of a long walk on a summer’s day in 2017, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst noticed that his legs felt heavy and poorly co-ordinated. ‘By the time I reached my front door I was shuffling along like an old man in carpet slippers.’ He was in his late forties and wondered if these were the first flickering ...”

“... was in the Marshalsea. It wasn’t the childhood he wanted, so he hadn’t spoken about it. For Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, in his clever new study, the mass of biographies can make Dickens’s life seem as inevitable as a fairy tale, his genius so self-evident that a novelist’s career was certain. But the alternative lives he might have led, as a ...”