Death is the one certainty in life yet with the decline of religion in the West we have become collectively reluctant to talk about it. Our contemporary rituals seek to sanitise death & distance us from our own inevitable fate. If we want to know how previous generations dealt with death graveyards (famous & not) tell us the history -- if we are able to read them. If we want to know how we struggle today with understanding or facing up to death then graveyards provide a starting point. & if we want to escape the present taboo on acknowledging our mortality & contemplate our own end then graveyards offer a rare welcome. From Neolithic mounds to internet memorials via medieval corpse roads & municipal cemeteries war graves & holocaust memorials Roman catacombs Pharaonic grave-robbers Hammer horrors body-snatchers Days of the Dead humanist burials & flameless cremations Stanford shows us how to read a graveyard what to look out for in our own & how even the most initially unpromising exploration can enthral.