Alexander Waugh
On and On and On
How to Live Forever or Die Trying
By Bryan Appleyard
Simon & Schuster 307pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
How to Live Forever – just what is needed right now – is a concise, clear and phenomenally interesting account of the immortality industry. Not that many of us really want to live forever. Who could stomach an eternal existence, with all its concomitant sorrows and inconveniences, the inevitable collapse of all personal ambition, the infinitely diminishing enthusiasm for other people, places, activities and things, a dread of the morrow, and a total boredom with oneself – who wants all that? Yet while thinking folk might shudder at the prospect of living on and on like Ariston, they still refuse to embrace the alternative, for death remains every bit as distasteful as immortality.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw
'Thirkell was a product of her time and her class. For her there are no sacred cows, barring those that win ribbons at the Barchester Agricultural.'
The novelist Angela Thirkell is due a revival, says Patricia T O'Conner (£).
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad
'Only in Britain, perhaps, could spy chiefs – conventionally viewed as masters of subterfuge – be so highly regarded as ethical guides.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-spy-who-taught-me