I have enjoyed this unusual and highly readable book. Part of its pleasure is Dr Coltart's distinctive writing ‘voice’ — strong, quirky, courageous and individual — which binds he book together. For example, patients for assessment who ring up and say, ‘Is that Nina?’ find that she becomes cool, even frosty; and she reports saying to one very difficult patient for assessment, ‘I don't recall saying you might call me Nina’. I therefore hasten to call her ‘Dr Coltart’.

She tells us that as she went on she realised that she would have to be more autobiographical than she anticipated. There is room for much more writing by psychotherapists about their own personal approach to life and work as a psychotherapist, among some of the more po-faced and boring of the rest of the literature.