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From Here to Eternity by Caitlin Doughty, Weidenfeld, 272pp, £15 At the outset of this book, subtitled “Travelling the World to Find the Good Death”, Caitlin Doughty quotes the psychiatrist Irvin D Yalom: “Adults who are racked with death anxiety are not odd birds who have contracted some exotic disease, but men and women whose family and culture have failed to knit the proper protective clothing for them to withstand the icy chill of mortality.” This is the second book I’ve reviewed in recent months based on this very premise: the modern world’s failure to provide rituals and practices that help us to face up to death…

Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray, Allen Lane, 170pp, £17.99 In his best-known book, Straw Dogs, the political philosopher and career misanthrope John Gray whittled away at our most cherished liberal beliefs as he sought to undermine almost 2,500 years of Western thought…

Christianity in the Twentieth Century by Brian Stanley, Princeton, 504pp, £27 A cynical old priest of my acquaintance, long dead, and so politically incorrect as to be, perhaps, scarcely quotable in 21st-century print, once said to me: “I never take much comfort from those who tell us that the Church is flourishing in Africa, even if it is declining in Europe…