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Tom Phillips and Dorian Lynskey

It’s the End of the World – or is it?

Hay Festival 2025, 

Do you feel like we’re living in the end times? You’re not the first to feel that way. Two tourists of the apocalypse have looked into the abyss, and come to share their findings with us.

Tom Phillips’ A Brief History of the End of the F*cking World is about the apocalypse, and how humans have always believed it to be nigh. The former Buzzfeed editorial director tells of weird cults, failed prophets and mass panics, holy warriors leading revolts in anticipation of the last days, and suburbanites waiting for aliens to rescue them.

Lynskey’s Everything Must Go is a witty exploration of our fantasies of the end of the world. He surveys the endings we have read, listened to or watched with morbid fascination, from the sci-fi terrors of HG Wells and John Wyndham to the apocalyptic ballads of Bob Dylan. Why do we like to scare ourselves?

In conversation with author and journalist, Oliver Bullough.