End runs in End Times

Mr O'Connell's timing was either a bit premature or just right. In the last three months a global pandemic has already killed tens of thousands

When Mark O’Connell began to work on his new book, Notes From an Apocalypse, four years ago, he was already thinking hard about the end times. “I was obsessed with the future, an obsession that manifested as an inability to conceive of there being any kind of future at all,” he writes. “Personal, professional and political anxieties had coalesced into a consuming apprehension of imminent catastrophe.” Widening inequality, surging nationalism, burning forests, melting ice caps: He describes an overwhelming sense of foreboding, the fear that whatever civilisational edifice has been erected was on the verge of total collapse.

Mr O’Connell’s timing