At the cutting edge

There’s a graveyard inside Henry Marsh’s head, though you’d never guess it to look at him. There he sits in his elegant flat in a small castle on a small island in the Oxford Thames: 67, attractive, restless. There he sits with the world all around him: Persian rugs, French tapestries, Japanese prints and his beautiful blonde wife (the anthropologist Kate Fox) in a separate flat below. But the ghosts of past patients are never far away.

Henry Marsh is a brain surgeon, celebrated for his skill in operating on patients under just local anaesthetic. He’s famous also for his astonishing memoir Do No Harm, to which he’s now written an equally remarkable sequel, Admissions. Both books are confessional, as clear-eyed and self-critical as Karl Ove Knausgaard — ‘Karl? He’s a friend! He’s really a very nice bloke,’ says Marsh — but unlike Karl, Henry’s subject isn’t just himself, it’s humanity.

Where Knausgaard navel-gazes, Marsh peers into the human cranium, and to read his books is to poke around with him inside the weird, wet architecture of the brain and to look over his shoulder as he excises parasitical tumours. It is also to face death with him, and to face being the cause of death. Marsh saves lives but occasionally, inevitably, he destroys them, and one of the most unexpected things about him, in print and in person, is how much this affects him.

‘I operated on a child in Ukraine last visit,’ he says, ‘and I made some bad decisions. It was a cyst, something called a colloid cyst, and she’d already had a failed operation in the hospital in Lviv — something had to be done. I tried to do the operation the way I would do it in England, but without the proper equipment. It was a disaster. She survived, but with very severe memory problems.’