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A scan of 'our most precious and elusive organ'. Photograph: Harry Sieplinga/hms Images/Getty Images
In 1984, after an unexplained fall, I woke up in a hospital in Rome acutely head-injured and disoriented. "I'm afraid you've had an emergency brain operation." A blurred but familiar face came into focus as the English girl who shared my flat; she had found me on the floor with my breathing irregular and speech garbled (in neurological terms, "aphasic"). In Hitchcock manner the phone was dangling off the hook; handprints of blood covered the walls where I had tried to steady myself. The police suspected an intruder. I had been on the phone to the Italian novelist Italo Calvino, whom I hoped to interview. Later, Calvino told me he heard "un tonfo" (a thud) before the line went dead.
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Ian Thomson
The Observer, Sunday 20 February 2011
A scan of 'our most precious and elusive organ'. Photograph: Harry Sieplinga/hms Images/Getty Images
In 1984, after an unexplained fall, I woke up in a hospital in Rome acutely head-injured and disoriented. "I'm afraid you've had an emergency brain operation." A blurred but familiar face came into focus as the English girl who shared my flat; she had found me on the floor with my breathing irregular and speech garbled (in neurological terms, "aphasic"). In Hitchcock manner the phone was dangling off the hook; handprints of blood covered the walls where I had tried to steady myself. The police suspected an intruder. I had been on the phone to the Italian novelist Italo Calvino, whom I hoped to interview. Later, Calvino told me he heard "un tonfo" (a thud) before the line went dead.