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What is it about the work of the neurologist Oliver Sacks that makes him read by thousands of people, people who could not write, any more than I could, 100 meaningful words about the workings of the human brain? There are, it seems, several related answers to this question. Principally, Sacks is a marvellous teller of stories. He has sought to reinstate the great nineteenth-century tradition of clinical narration that his intellectual mentor, the outstanding Soviet psychologist A.R. Luria, spoke of in a remark quoted by Sacks in the preface to his earlier collection, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: ‘The power to describe, which was so common to the great nineteenth-century neurologists and psychiatrists, is almost gone now … it must be revived’. That Sacks has revived this is unquestionable. He has a formidable ability to inhabit other worlds and to describe them almost from within. Of course, he never is inside. Inevitably he is always the observer but this does not mean that he is detached. And it is this lack of detachment, I think, that makes him so appealing. We, his readers, respond to the qualities that he brings to the telling of his stories' narratives, above all qualities of wonder at what the human condition can include, a humility in