Column by David in The Times.
I’M PRESENTLY READING Julian Barnes’s excellent new work, Nothing to be Frightened Of, which is a meditation on death. In fact, the word “meditation” doesn’t really describe it: an obsessive rumination, perhaps, or a horrifically fascinated working-through of anything anyone might ever think on the subject. It’s like when you get a song in your head and can’t get rid of it, only in Barnes’s case it’s a song written by the Grim Reaper himself, lyrically describing his own demise.