and interest began to build around the book he was working on. "As I"ve said many times," he told me, "there"s nothing original about the idea that consciousness poses a hard problem. But that phrase does turn out to be a very effective way of posing the problem as a challenge, and making it harder for people to avoid." He had brought a vast theme to life with a clarity that commanded attention – and that suggested several tantalisingly specific lines of investigation.