Susan Mansfield

psychological equivalent of A&E. I suppose I had quite a burning need to come to grips with a subject which is very hard to come to grips with. I’ve always grappled with these thingsbywritingaboutthem.”

A fall in the street felt like a reminder of mortality, and, while he had his first brush with death more than 20 years ago, suddenly his friends were having them too. “In the last six months, three friends have died, all in their sixties. One of them went to sleep and his wife woke up the next day and found him dead. He was somebody I travelled around Europe with as a hippyish teenager in 1970, and now I’m at his funeral. It’s hard to escape that.

“You’d have to be very cavalier not to pay attention to the invasion of mortality.”

His approach to the subject is, perhaps not surprisingly, to reflect on it through the lens of literature (he is the author of two books on the English language and a biography of P G Wodehouse as well as several novels, and was editor-in-chief at Faber & Faber before joining the Observer as literary editor). He also interviewed doctors, neuroscientists and people suffering from terminal illnesses, and collected all manner of anecdotes about death, not all of them gloomy.

Oneofthoseinterviewed for the book is writer and broadcaster Clive James, whose obituary Mccrum wrote in 2015 when he was believed to have died after a battle with leukaemia (James is still alive, and now writes a column for The Guardian called Rumours of My Death). “He wrote this poem about death called Japanese Maple which went viral, about this young tree in his garden, how it would live on and he wouldn’t be there to see it. Everyone was saying what a great poet he was, what a great last poem. You go and visit him, he’ll point it out, it’s in his backyard, it’s no longer a sapling, it’s a great big Japanese maple. He’s quite embarrassed by it. It’s both funny and sad at the same time. But I think the funny/sad thing is worth hanging on to if we’re not to plunge into a black hole of despair.”

By and large, he says, his generation will do anything to avoid talking about death. “The Baby Boomers have been encouraged to think they’re immortal, and to fulfil themselves as much as possible, to live as though they would live forever and not to accept any restrictions on anything. And suddenly, they’re being constricted by physical decline and by the narrowing of horizons. It’s very frustrating.”

Medical advances have done much to prolong life, but,