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Here's my latest piece in Literary Review – a round-up of recent books about death and longevity [the wording differs very slightly from the printed version]...End of the Line‘It is the strangest of all truths. We will all die. We all know we will die. But few of us truly believe we will die, few of us can imagine we will die.’ So begins Richard Coker’s Timor Mortis: How We Live With Death (New Modern Arcade 296pp £20). It’s a promising start to a wide-ranging study of the many dimensions of death, and how our understanding of it has changed over time. Coker describes his book as a ‘hybrid memoir’, and it draws heavily on his experiences as a physician and public health specialist, with something too of his personal life. He is clearly a humane and intuitive doctor, strongly opposed to the practice of medicine as ‘engineering without art’, which in extremis can lead to doctors becoming ‘torturers’. ‘Tenderness and truth’, he writes, should always trump ‘technological bravado’,…