Death is the one promise life makes to us that it always keeps. From Homer, whose warriors at Troy are engulfed in the darkness of death, to Larkin glumly ‘going to the inevitable’, writers have shown us how the fear of death both drives and destroys our creative spirit. David Ellis’s fascinating new book is an examination of the death of D H Lawrence, that fierce champion of life.

Death and the Author begins with Lawrence in February 1930, near to death in what his friend Norman Douglas called ‘one of those dreadful little bungalows’ at Bandol on the French Riviera. Lawrence had lived in many places: Australia, New Mexico, Mexico, Sicily, Tuscany, and France. If they