Thomas Laqueur is emeritus professor of history at Berkeley. His most recent book is The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains.
The dead present an enigma that can’t be grasped: they are always there in mind, they come back in dreams, live in memory, and if they don’t, that is even more disturbing, somehow reprehensible.
Lounging in a boat anchored near his home, daydreaming about a ‘pretty wench’ he’d spotted in Westminster earlier that day, Samuel Pepys became so aroused that he ejaculated...
The other day I came across an article by Professor Laqueur, written some fourteen years ago, which makes a striking and dismaying contrast to the book he has just published. The contrast is...
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