Paperbacks

Literary editor and writer Robert Mccrum suffered a stroke more than 20 years ago and wrote a memoir about how he gradually recovered. Every Third Thought: On Life,

Death and the Endgame (Picador, 242pp, £9.99, Oldie price £7 inc p&p) ‘is a book about the fear of death and how to calm it’, wrote John Carey in the Sunday Times. ‘A baby-boomer, [Mccrum] suspects that his generation finds death harder to accept than their parents did, because they have been overindulged and fed with baloney about their limitless personal potential.’ Roger Lewis in the

Times thought it a ‘wry and reflective treatise on ageing and mortality’ or, as Blake Morrison put it in the

Guardian, a ‘philosophical meander’. Comedian, actor, writer, presenter – is there no end to Stephen Fry’s talents? His latest venture is a retelling of the Greek myths in Mythos (Penguin, 442pp, £8.99, Oldie price £8.42 inc p&p). ‘The Greek myths don’t die, they are recycled,’ said Antonia Senior in the Times. ‘Everything is made relevant to our age in Stephen Fry’s irreverent and witty version. The gods and goddesses bicker like panel show comedians and Kronos, the dark and murderous father of Zeus, is described as “Konstantin from The Seagull with a suggestion of Morrissey”.’ ‘Dialogue is Fry’s great strength,’ confirmed Edith Hall in the Guardian, and she commended Fry for putting ‘his fame to such constructive use’. And Henry Whorwood, in the Telegraph, thought it the ‘best thing he’s written’ since his first novel ( The Liar, 1991).

Sam Kean begins his book with the story that every breath you take includes a morsel of Caesar’s dying breath. It would have contained ‘so many molecules…that, even after they have been mixed up and distributed around the globe for 2,000 years, we are likely to inhale thousands of them every day’, explained Clive Cookson in the FT. Caesar’s Last Breath: The Epic Story of the Air Around Us (Black Swan, 374pp, £9.99, Oldie price £7.64 inc p&p) ‘tells the story of the formation of the Earth... [and] charts the future, covering climate change, nuclear fallout and the search for habitable planets’, wrote James Mcconnachie in the Sunday Times. His ‘writing is funny, clever and altogether effervescent’.