The fatal sleep

Generally we think of euthanasia in terms of individual cases, but Philip Toynbee, the novelist, poet, and literary critic, who died in 1981, believed in mass euthanasia. In his book The Fearful Choice, published in 1957, when nuclear winter rather than global warning was the apocalypse in vogue, he wrote of the results of a nuclear war: “Have we decided how we are to kill the other members of our household in the event of our being less injured than they are? Over most of the country there will probably be …