Do you know it? 'Who built the pyramids?' The immediate answer is the pharaohs, but the pharaohs didn't lift a finger. It goes on: 'When the Chinese wall was built, where did the masons go for lunch?' And it ends up, 'When the Armada sank, we read that King Philip of Spain wept. Were there no other tears?' It's those who shed those other tears that I'm interested in."On the tear-drenched subject of death, he has assembled a cast of 60, made up of doctors and nurses, firemen and police officers, a Vietnam veteran and a former Death Row inmate, a Hiroshima survivor and someone with Aids Unusually, too, he includes his own voice. In previous books, you have got a strong sense of Studs, but subliminally He has never been one for guiding his readers.

He has left them to reach their own conclusions.This time round, though, he goes on the record about his own thoughts "In this case I had to It was doctors who told me to do this book. My cardiologist and the doctor who did my quintuple bypass [in 1996], they all said, 'You gotta do this goddamn book.' So I had this book in mind before my wife's death, but that added a certain urgency It has been a palliative for me in a strange way Therapeutic. She was 87, and people will say, 'You had 60 years', but that's bullshit. I still see her when she was arrested in the anti-war protests, or in the forefront of the Civil Rights things."I married her in the Depression The old gag is that I married her for her money She was a social worker making $125 a month I was making $85 Oh, man! And then I took her to a French movie.

I borrowed 15 bucks from her and married her and never paid her back I'm going way back. I have a thing a friend of mine calls 'disenfranchised grief'. Because we had 60 years, and it was a good life, people tell me not to grieve, but I do."Has doing the book gone farther than easing that grief? Has it changed his view on life after death? "I envy people who believe in an afterlife," he says firmly "In no way do I denigrate them I respect them Their belief gives them solace That's pretty good. Why not? But I remain an agnostic, which I describe as a cowardly atheist. It's best to cover all bases."Not that he is planning to depart this mortal coil quite yet. He's busy on a book about hope and another, called The Listener, that collects his conversations with great recording artists, including Mahalia Jackson – whose gospel music he introduced to white America in the 1950s and 1960s.There are, he points out, two sides to his career. The first was the interviews with famous names on his radio show, which he gave up on account of his hearing.

The second is where he remains a peerless listener to "ordinary" Americans. "It's pretty exciting stuff," he says, "asking people, often for the first time.. about their lives. If I have any gift for it, one of the things in my favour is that I'm inept mechanically. The people I interview think I need them to help me work the machine I can't drive and I goof up with the tape-recorders I've lost Martha Graham I lost Michael Redgrave. I almost lost Bertrand Russell."The only other American who was as bad with a tape-recorder as me was Richard Nixon I described Nixon and me as neo-Cartesians.