Light at the end

It’s an irony of our secular age that the more we fear death, the more enticing we find it. The past few years have seen a slew of bestsellers on the subject — Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, Julian Barnes’s Nothing to be Frightened Of, Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm (a title taken from the Hippocratic Oath —an oath no doctor actually swears). To this crowded field Robert McCrum brings a book both intensely personal — he reflects not only on his mortality but on the death of his marriage — and coolly objective. It’s proof, yet again, that death makes for lively reading.

Twenty-one years ago, as readers of the memoir My Year Out will know, McCrum suffered a near-fatal stroke. At just 42, he entered ‘the antechamber to the grave’; and, although he made a good recovery, he has lived, ever since, with an acute apprehension of mortality.