In Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Humbert Humbert offers a memorably brief account of his parents' death: "picnic, lightning." Picnic Comma Lightning, too, opens with death-that of Laurence Scott's mother-because, for a philosopher, death...

Laurence Scott's book The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World (2015) was shortlisted for The Samuel Johnson Prize, won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Prize, and was named the Sunday Times ¿Thought Book of...