Poignant Publication Days by Julia Jones
The final ‘Bernie Gunther’ thriller, Metropolis by Philip Kerr was published last Thursday. So was Nicci Gerrard’s What DementiaTeaches Us about Love . Missing from the celebrations were Philip Kerr, who died from cancer in March 2018, and Nicci’s father Dr John Gerrard whose ‘catastrophic’ decline and death in 2014 was the starting point both for John's Campaign and for the much wider concerns of this passionate new book. At the pre-publication party for Metropolis Philip Kerr was represented by his wife Jane Thynne who quoted Philip Larkin’s famous line, ‘what will survive of us is love’. She would have been as aware as anyone in her audience that this statement, in context, is not unadulterated Valentine’s Day schmaltz. Here is the last verse of Larkin's ‘An Arundel Tomb’: Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone fidelity They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: ...