The recycled ingredients of texts that disseminate evidence-based medicine, although essential, sometimes acquire the bland heaviness of the worst school dinners. How stimulating, then, to read a book so full of zest that boldly admits to being a highly personalised and opinionated account of a field in which the author is an acknowledged expert. Rather than dwell on the areas of consensus, Panayiotopoulos tells us in the opening pages that he “often has to argue against generally applauded statements” about epilepsy, and contends that “differential diagnosis is seldom undertaken for epilepsies”. Throughout the book, the image persists of the …