In this week’s Takimag column, our favorite doctor reviews the highly successful book series The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by his acquaintance, Alexander McCall Smith.

The only written words of mine that have ever had a practical effect on the world appeared in my review of Alexander McCall Smith’s book The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. Mine was the first review in the national press, and I like to think that it paid some small part in catapulting this, and subsequent books in the series, into the international best-seller lists. At any rate, the words have been quoted hundreds of thousands of times since, on the back of the same number of books.