"'I may die before my time,' Gillian Rose says in this remarkable book. She did, but she understood dying as few people have, and she lived her drastically shortened time as a philosopher who believed both in the soul and in the necessary charm of earthly powers....Death is at the heart of the book, but no one has ever argued more beautifully or eloquently that 'death is not nothing,' and that mourning, when it becomes the law, that is, when it returns to reason, could even put an end to what Gillian Rose calls the 'endless dying' of life under tyranny." Michael Wood, Princeton University
"These essays contribute to the picture of a remarkable spiritual odyssey, by a rare, demanding and pitiless intelligence." --The New Statesman
"This is a wonderful book that manages that rare feat of combining high levels of both passion and rigour. I highly recommend it." David Sherman, Dialogue