Anthony Daniels

Fearing The Worst

Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives

By

Penguin Ireland 277pp £18.99 order from our bookshop

In a sense, we live in a golden age of hypochondriasis, for we are by far the healthiest people who have ever lived and yet we fret about our health as much or more than those who lived during the Black Death. A long life expectancy does not by itself alleviate anxiety; the difference between our fears and objective reality has never been greater.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • Lecture on war and peace in 19th-century Europe by Professor Sir Richard Evans, Thurs 25 Oct, 6.30pm Europe House… ,
    • 'Why, throughout the world, are so many people fascinated by the fiction and reality of espionage? And why of all p… ,
    • . here on books, Muriel Spark and life's tangled dance ,
    • RT : There aren't enough aggressive subtitles these days: ,
    • Churchill's on the cover of the October edition of the magazine. Piers Brendon reviews two new books about the Brit… ,
    • 'Readers have no more power to predict where the next story is going to take them than the prisoners had to determi… ,
    • 'Ho was no Soviet or Chinese puppet. He was a nationalist first and foremost. Had the Americans just realised this.… ,
    Follow Us