A Strong Dose of Myself collects Abse's essays, broadcasts and lectures from the past decade. They are presented frankly as an assemblage of disparate items, a "mosaic" in which Abse hopes the reader will "find a pattern". A pattern, if that means a structure which implies an appropriate place for every fragment, does not emerge, but there are recurrent themes, which will be familiar to those who have enjoyed Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve and A Poet in the Family: medical practice, the search for a poetic voice, the richly quirky suburban existence of a family of "wandering Welsh Jews", the self-doubt and self-advertisement of a competitive youngest son.

Inevitably, perhaps, some of the most absorbing pieces are those dealing with medical experience. "Notes Mainly at the Clinic" is chiefly concerned not with cancer and tuberculosis but with psychology: the psychology of the incompetent doctor, of the...