Oliver Sacks loved receiving letters. The author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat never owned a computer or a smartphone and did not know who Michael Jackson was. He retained the letters he received and spent hours each week responding to them. Many of his longest replies were handwritten with a fountain pen. His script was bold and, for a doctor, quite legible; some nouns were unusually capitalised, and there were many brackets and underlinings. Flourishes of afterthought were scrawled in the margins. Sometimes he used an Olympia manual typewriter, tapping with two fingers at a machine-gun rate, creating a page riddled with typos and crossings-out. 

This selection of Sacks’s letters, chosen by his longstanding collaborator Kate Edgar, includes exchanges with his parents, brothers, friends, medical colleagues, patients, literary and scientific mentors, acquaintances and people he did not know personally. Although the collection is seven hundred pages long, it represents a fraction of Sacks’s total correspondence (an estimated 200,000 pages filling seventy bankers boxes).

Writing literary letters has become a dying art, and it is possible that this collection might be the last of its kind involving a contemporary author. The 350 or so letters in the book are arranged into epochs. The first dates from the summer of 1960, after Sacks’s arrival in