Preface
I owe my acquaintance with the writings of Iain McGilchrist to my friend Charles Murray-Brown, who gave me a copy of The Master and his Emissary following a holiday in which there had been much talk of an earlier book on brain hemispheres by Julian Jaynes. I was captivated by McGilchrist’s writing, his temperament and his thesis. The Matter with Things came out towards the end of 2021 and for various reasons I found myself asked to copy edit the first edition with a view to the forthcoming paperback (now published). This came at a difficult time for me personally, and there was great therapeutic benefit in following the argument in this long and inexhaustibly rich book. What I have to say about it is largely expressed in the longer of the two reviews, for The New Criterion. Over the last few years Iain and I have become friends; we have drunk deeply in each other’s houses, his in Skye, mine in Dorset, and taken part in a couple of public events, of which the first, in Oxford, engendered the short address on the authenticity of the inarticulate which is the third of the pieces here – all of them devoted to what, echoing the encomium with which I began the Spectator review, I regard as probably the most important book I have ever read.