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Everything!”
    The book’s title referred to Oliver’s theory, but also to his capacity for self-destruction. Even without his ideas about neuroscience he would have made an arresting character study. An intellectual and a performer, imbued with the traditional arrogance of his craft, he was a man equally cast in temper and reason. But it was how the nature of his research sat within Oliver’s own life that had convinced Michael that Oliver would be the subject of his next book. Oliver, as far as he could tell, was a man driven by an unacknowledged desire to fathom his own failings. To discover the neurological manifestation of the very emotion he himself most appeared to lack. It was this, beyond the colour of Oliver’s life, Michael hoped his second book would be about. An intimate portrait of a search for why we feel for others, often beyond ourselves, conducted by a man whose default position was only ever to think of himself.

    For the past two years Michael had accompanied Oliver to conferences, lectures, broadcasting studios, seminars, and operating theatres. Over the course of their time together, as other colleagues had fallen away, his presence in Oliver’s life had grown to occupy the spaces they’d left. In time he became the kind of witness men like Oliver needed. At first Oliver had merely tolerated Michael’s presence. But then he’d begun to court it. For the last year of Michael’s research, he’d come to rely on it. Oliver was an actor for whom the public world of popular neuroscience had become a stage, his many critics and detractors an audience. But when they were no longer on hand, or had tired of his antics, it was Michael who’d remained; a dedicated audience of one, there to sit and watch Oliver’s late-night rants in his London club, or to answer the phone in the morning and listen to his latest theories.
    Michael and Caroline’s leaving London coincided with Michael’s leaving of Oliver. He’d reached that point in his process when he must turn away from the man himself, to the man he’d render on the page. The arc of the book, Michael felt, was complete. Oliver had written it almost perfectly, plotting over the last year a course in his private life in exact inverse trajectory to the ascendency of his public one. In this respect Michael’s sense of a story had come good. During his time with Oliver he’d watched as the character traits he’d detected when they’d first met became inflated with attention to cause havoc with his marriage, his children, and the many colleagues who would no longer talk to him. At the same time, however, and with perfect symmetry as far as Michael was concerned, just as Oliver was being ostracised by his family and friends, so his ideas on mirror neurons and empathy were being accepted by the scientific community.

    Michael set up his study in one of the cottage’s upper rooms at Coed y Bryn, a simple table in front of a window through which, on a clear day, he could see the Severn glinting on the horizon. Although he still fielded calls from Oliver, and had agreed to meet him once when he’d come west to deliver a lecture in Bath, Michael knew he needed to withdraw into the necessary hibernation of his writing. After two years of fitting his life to Oliver’s hectic schedule, he wanted to slow and still his days so he could both immerse himself in, and take himself out, of his story.
    As Michael worked on his book upstairs, Caroline began a new job in Bristol. Before they’d left London she’d applied for a producer’s position at Sightline Productions, a TV company specialising in news and investigative documentary. The directors of the company had been thrilled to welcome someone of Caroline’s experience. Although she’d fallen short of becoming a household name with the satellite channel, she’d garnered a growing respect within the industry. There was personality to her reports and by the age of thirty she’d already broken two