RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)As Marsh is at pains to explain, doctors do not know as much as their patients want them to, and can only predict in terms of statistical probabilities. Now that he no longer has patients’ feelings to consider, he is able to be admirably cogent and honest ... [An] intelligent and dynamic man ... Fascinating, unusually revelatory, ultimately conflicted and poignant.
Frances Wilson
PositiveThe Financial TimesWilson begins her account with the Ratcliffe murders, 'the point at which his life broke in half,' but this does not quite work. It is also a mistake to try to suggest De Quincey’s own apocalyptic view of London by borrowing occasional descriptions from more recent writers: they are anachronistic as applied to the city in the early 1800s. But these are minor flaws in a richly intelligent and well-informed study, which will surely become the favoured one for our time.
