At the cutting edge

There’s a graveyard inside Henry Marsh’s head, though you’d never guess it to look at him. There he sits in his elegant flat in a small castle on a small island in the Oxford Thames: 67, attractive, restless. There he sits with the world all around him: Persian rugs, French tapestries, Japanese prints and his beautiful blonde wife (the anthropologist Kate Fox) in a separate flat below. But the ghosts of past patients are never far away.

Henry Marsh is a brain surgeon, celebrated for his skill in operating on patients under just local anaesthetic. He’s famous also for his astonishing memoir Do No Harm, to which he’s now written an equally remarkable sequel, Admissions. Both books are confessional, as clear-eyed and self-critical as Karl Ove Knausgaard — ‘Karl? He’s a friend! He’s really a very nice bloke,’ says Marsh — but unlike Karl, Henry’s subject isn’t just himself, it’s humanity.