Until Further Notice, I Am Alive by Tom Lubbock: review An operation to remove the tumour revealed it was malignant, fast-growing and incurable: "Something in my head," Lubbock recorded, "is hurrying to kill me." But having told friends he was dying, he reconsidered. Noting that, "a fatal diagnosis is a sovereign cure for hypochondria," he wrote in an email: "Until further notice, I am alive." Lubbock described his physical and mental state with the keen intelligence and fine observation that he brought to his critical writing. "A new motto," he wrote. Neither mysticism nor stoicism. He records the knowledge that his new sofa bed will outlast him not with panic or resentment, but with curiosity and an acceptance of mortality that is very far from resignation. His oncologist observes that he is "doing amazingly well." In what way? Lubbock wonders. It is his attitude, apparently, that has amazed her: "I'm amazingly undespondent. Well, this is true - and it is not a guard that drops when I am alone... Still, I would not describe this as an attitude... It is a kind of duty, to myself and others, not to be cast down. And it isn't a struggle. You could call this courage, or to use an old-fashioned term, grace. Montaigne, who discussed death in his Essays with a mixture of robust spirituality and amused pragmatism of which there is a potent echo in this memoir, wrote that he hoped death would find him planting cabbages. The penultimate entry in Tom Lubbock's journal, an intensely resonant fragment, written even as language escaped him, reads, "My body. My tree. After that it becomes simply the world. If one sought a lesson in how to die, one could hardly do better. Until Further Notice, I Am Alive Tom Lubbock Granta, £12.99, 160pp Follow SEVEN on Twiter @TelegraphSeven