Getting Better: Life lessons on going under, getting over it, and getting through it

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Rosen hands me a postcard replica of an engraving of a man struggling to carry an elephant up a hill. In Getting Better, Rosen describes the moment he discovered a photograph of a baby boy sitting on his mother’s knee. And I think the soles of his shoes had some funny things on them, or they were different colours or something. Its series of short prose poems is also a highly appropriate way to convey the varying states of consciousness which characterised Rosen’s experience of Covid-19. What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against?

This is as much a book about finding the words to express our troubles as it is about the author’s life and Rosen, who is professor of children’s literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, is a generous teacher. They perceived their childhood as safe and “normal,” but as they gained an awareness of their burgeoning queerness, the outside world began to undermine the “vulnerably thin veneer” of their existence. He has certainly been through a lot in his lifetime and I think recognises that sharing his experiences will undoubtedly help others. What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all?He also had a long-term illness for over a decade without realising it and Jewish relatives who he discovered died in Nazi concentration camps. Be it as Nicky Hutchinson in Our Friends In The North, Maurice in The A Word, or his reinvention of Doctor Who, one man, in life and death, has accompanied Christopher Eccleston every step of the way – his father Ronnie. Windows users should also consider upgrading to Internet Explorer 11, Microsoft Edge, or switching to Firefox or Chrome.

In this wide-ranging collection, dramatisations and readings of some of his major works are brought together, exploring themes such as romantic love and sexual desire, individual freedom, class division, war, the beauty of nature and the ugliness of industrialisation. Over the course of a decade from 2010, Rory Stewart went from being a political outsider to standing for prime minister - before being sacked from a Conservative Party that he had come to barely recognise. Throughout, the tales in this collection exemplify themes and ideas related to work and the class system, sometimes in wish-fulfilling ways. The notes he made then became Carrying the Elephant: A Memoir of Love and Loss, a book that Many Different Kinds of Love resembles in form. There's been quite a battle going on in my brain between the keen one who wants to learn, and the crusty one who says no go away, shut up.The very last chapter can probably be safely skipped (eat fibre, stay hydrated, take regular exercise, look after your core etc), but then again the very last couple of paragraphs draw a lot of the rambling together a bit.