Before I became confined to a wheelchair two years ago after an operation for a spinal abscess, I’d never read a book about disability. More remarkably, considering the tiny amount of time it would have taken, I’d never read a newspaper article about it either. The only media stories about disabled people I’d bothered with concerned famous sufferers, such as Christopher Reeve and Robert Wyatt. I’d also followed with voyeuristic revulsion the 2021 story of Giles Coren celebrating the death of the young, working-class, disabled journalist Dawn Foster after she’d had the temerity to cross him.

So there you go. My concern with disability was confined to where it overlapped with showbiz and media. This being the case, it would ill behove me to strike indignant attitudes now about how my kind are treated, reading my first book on the subject at the age of 66. It didn’t start well. There was a content warning, listing all the unpleasant things that the book might contain, signed off with ‘Please approach with care’. Surely it’s this sort of squeamishness that has made the disabled so invisible – a situation which this book seeks to right.

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But it got much better. David Turner begins with an examination of 1821’s Biography of the Blind by James Wilson, a 37-year-old furniture restorer, who wrote ‘the first book to centre on the historical experiences of disabled people’. Sorry for myself because I was constipated (a common side effect of being in a wheelchair), I felt a mixture of admiration........

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