All the Living and the Dead: A Personal Investigation into the Death Trade

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As a kid, I remember a photograph I saw in a book of an adult who had died in their armchair as a result of spontaneous combustion. The book’s colorful cast includes Nick Reynolds, son of the mastermind behind the 1963 heist known as the “Great Train Robbery” and the last maker of death masks in the U. A careful, moving investigation of existential matters told with a keen literary sense and memorable personal insights.

The psychological impact of losing someone you love and confronting the physical reality of death at the same time, and the tangled mindfuck that might be, was not something I thought I could swerve. As well as being a champion of animal rights and women’s rights, he believed in gay rights at a time when homosexuality was illegal, and he was one of the first to donate his body to science.

It's a taboo topic in some circles, and too painful to discuss in others but like Hayley Campbell, it's always been of interest to me. He wanted to be publicly dissected by his friends, and everyone here is the kind of person who would have gone to watch.

It manages the astonishing balancing act of conveying Hayley Campbell's own fascination with Death, the dead, and the people who deal with death in one or other of its manifestations, while also allowing us to feel what she feels for the living and the dead. If you were ever curious about death and the people that work with the dead, All the Living and the Dead is a must read. Aaron, who now runs the mortuary, a short walk across the cemetery from where we sit, used to work at the greyhound track nearby; the body collection van driver, Stuart, is a firefighter, and says that working here part-time is like going back for the ones he couldn’t save. But epiphanies in modernist fiction, and especially in the stories of Joyce’s Dubliners, are frequently ambiguously poised between capturing genuine enlightenment (the protagonist has a life-changing realisation) and temporary change of mood (the protagonist thinks they have undergone a life-changing experience, but in reality, nothing has changed and they will probably relapse into their old habits the next day). Bentham was an eccentric philosopher – some of his ideas would land him in prison today, or at least get him thrown off the university campus – but he was ahead of the curve on many things.

Yet despite the fact that we are surrounded by it, death is something we don’t really address head on. She broke loose from him and ran to the bed and, throwing her arms across the bed-rail, hid her face. About fifty of us are in a large room at University College London, holding a ‘wake’ for a long-dead philosopher on his 270th birthday.