at various times: Olivier Wong, Frank Slattery, Douglas Shenson, Carl Elliott, Bruce Charlton, John and Mary Gillies, Jeremy Garwood, Christopher Harvie, Christine and Richard Thayer, David Bellos, Jim Campbell, Gerald Mangan, Les Murray, Alberto Manguel, Frederic Raphael, Marjorie Farquharson, Desmond Avery, Brian Hurwitz, William Ian (Bill) Miller, Peter and Maria McCarey, as well as to my editors at Carcanet Helen Tookey and Luke Allan. I would like to thank Lewis Lapham for commissioning me to write a ‘reappraisal’ of The Magic Mountain, one of the key novels of the twentieth-century, and for Alastair Campbell and the medical ethics staff at the National University of Singapore, who allowed me to expand some of my thoughts about Hans Castorp at a meeting of their journal club. Living in Strasbourg— or ‘Strasburg’ as Laurence Sterne spells it in Tristram Shandy, where it gets a whole chapter to itself—has been to be aware of living (for twenty years now) ‘far out in the centre’, to purloin the title of a book by Dannie Abse: in the heart of a Europe that has no body politic. That unreality notwithstanding, my wife Cornelia was a constant presence in good and bad times, and I feel fortunate to have enjoyed the companionship of my family throughout the years covered by this book, during which my two children Felix and Claire have grown up. ‘Sooner or later,’ as Germain Muller, founder of the local dialect theatre De Barabli, noted, ‘all Strasburgers end up loving Strasbourg.’ Needless to say (although it must be said), the opinions expressed in the essays engage my responsibility only.

xii  A Doctor’s Dictionary