Raymond Tallis trained as a doctor before going on to become Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester, UK. He was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences for his research in clinical neuroscience. He retired from medicine in 2006 to become a full-time writer. He has published fiction, poetry and over a dozen books of cultural criticism and philosophical anthropology including, most recently, Aping Mankind (2011). He has published two other collections of essays with Acumen, In Defence of Wonder (2012) and Reflections of a Metaphysical Flaneur (2013).