‘Let’s get this death thing straight’, declares Julian Barnes in his recently published memoir-cum-meditation Nothing to Be Frightened Of. He sets out to confront mortality, the titular ‘nothing’, but manages only to peer at it through parted fingers. He takes short peeks, which calls to mind the title of his death-haunted novel Staring at the Sun (1986).

Barnes’s death awareness, discovered at ‘13 or 14’, strikes him daily. Nocturnal attacks leave him punching his pillow and shouting ‘Oh no Oh No OH NO in an endless wail’. This image conjures the great poem ‘Aubade’ by mortal terror exemplar Philip Larkin about waking at 4 a.m., staring around the bedroom and seeing unresting death.