For the next few weeks I read with equal anxiety the opinions that the Professor expressed in his case-notes on my diagnoses and those that Mr Justice Hopcroft expressed in court on the characters of his convicted criminals. Bingham now smirked every time he spoke to me, and had become intolerable. He was a bad case of the seasonal disease that struck the medical school known as 'Diplomatosis', which was characterized by delusions of grandeur and loss of memory for recent events. He had thrown away his ignominious short student's jacket, and appeared everywhere in a long white coat which he reluctantly removed only for meals; his stethoscope, which he had never carried secretly, now sprouted from his head as proudly as the horns of a rutting deer; he hurried round the hospital with jerky, urgent strides, which implied that consultations of the gravest aspect waited round every corner; he addressed patients, relatives, and junior probationers like a Victorian practitioner breaking bad news; and the responsibilities of qualification left him too preoccupied to recognize the faces of fellow-students who had been less fortunate with the examiners.

I thought Bingham's most irritating performance was in the lift.