`Making sense of the way we make sense of the world" is Frank Kermode's aim in The Sense of an Ending. Whether Biblical threat; fears about the bomb; or the prospect of the much-hyped but stingless Millennium bug, all our qualms about the end boil down to our fear of our own end, writes Kermode, digging into the Bible, Shakespeare, the poetry of Wallace Stevens, the Holocaust and more en route. Kermode is a noted critic who has written many fine books, the most recent being the impressive Shakepeare's Language. The Sense of an Ending was first published in the 1960s, when the notion of Apocalypse was more of an immediate prospect than it is now, but in this edition he adds a new "Epilogue" to update his thoughts on how we view the passing of time. The prospect of our own demise forces us to try to create a meaning for what happens to us between "the tick of birth and the tock of death": "To make sense of our lives from where we are, as it were, stranded in the middle, we need fictions of beginnings and fictions of ends, fictions which unite beginnings and ends and endow the interval between them with meaning . . . it is ourselves we are encountering whenever we invent fictions."