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One of the most significant publishers of my lifetime died in London yesterday.

Born and educated in Melbourne, Dame Carmen Thérèse Callil, DBE, FRSL (1938 – 2022) was the founder of Virago Press in 1973.  She was a champion of women’s writing and published some of the most important writers of our age such as Angela Carter, Maya Angelou and Margaret Atwood while also bringing back into print a backlist of authors such as Antonia White, Willa Cather,  and Rebecca West.

Virago covers were always distinctive — I can pick them out on my paperback shelves in an instant just by the cover of the spine.  They featured superb art works such as the detail from ‘Carolina Morning‘ by Edward Hopper on the cover of Their Eyes were Watching God.  All the titles I have also have insightful introductions such as the one by Drusilla Modjeska for Winged…

A Good Life to the End has to be one of the most depressing books I’ve read this year, but it’s an important one that faces up to some unpleasant facts.

Although I think it deserves a wider audience, I think the book will have most resonance for those of us confronting the end of life for aged parents, who are having to make decisions for loved ones no longer able to make those decisions for themselves, and who are realising that the same issues apply to us as we ourselves get older.

Professor Ken Hillman is Professor of Intensive Care at the University of New South Wales (SWS Clinical School), and an actively practising clinician in Intensive Care, at Liverpool Hospital.  He’s also the presenter of the TED talk ‘We’re doing dying all wrong’, though I didn’t see that till I Googled his profile for this review.

After the uplifting…