The current month is October; the month of Halloween and the month of Dia los Muertos (the Day of the Dead). One could, charitably, call October the Month of the Dead. So, to celebrate the Month of the Dead, I will introduce a feature of this blog; the obituaries of the famous dead

The first thing that strikes you about the dead is just how many of them there are. The statement that you oft hear bandied about that there are more people living now than have ever lived is ridiculous - by orders of magnitude. Over the 100,000 years of Homo sapiens sapiens' existence, the number of them who have ever lived, fought, loved, fussed, pottered and finally died numbers over ninety billion.

That's a big number, especially when you try and cover all of them. But it all depends on perspective. You could bury everyone who has ever lived, side by side, in an area the size of Oklahoma. That’s just 0.1 per cent of the land area of the Earth. And if you piled all the dead people who have ever lived on to an enormous set of scales they would be comfortably outweighed by the ants that are out there right now, plotting to usurp us.

The Dead are, literally, our family. Not just the ones we know we are related to: our two parents, four grandparents and eight great-grandparents. Go back ten generations and each of us has a thousand direct relatives, go back fifteen and the number soars to more than 35,000 (and that’s not counting aunts and uncles). In fact, we only need to go back to the year 1250 to have more direct ancestors than the number of human beings who have ever lived. The solution to this apparent paradox is that we’re all interrelated: the further back you go, the more ancestors we are likely to share. The earliest common ancestor of me and Lena Headey (probably) only lived about 600 years ago, and everyone alive on the planet today is related both to Confucius (551–479 BC) and to Nefertiti (1370–1330 BC). So this is a book of family history for everyone.

Trying to organise relatives is always a challenge. The great film director Billy Wilder once pointed out that an actor entering through a door gives the audience nothing, ‘but if he enters through the window, you’ve got a situation’. With this in mind, I’ve avoided the usual approach of organising famous people into professional groupings: scientists, kings, business people, murderers, etc. This is a perfectly reasonable system, except that, families being what they are, the actors and musicians will be tempted to ignore the table labelled ‘accountants’ or ‘psychologists’ and vice versa. So I started from a different premise, sorting people into groups that focus on shared themes in their lives rather than professions. These themes are familiar to everyone: our relationship to our parents, our state of health, our sexual appetites, our attitude to work, our sense of what it all means. I also draw no distinction between people with universally familiar names and those who are virtually unheard of. This leads to some strange juxtapositions; Isaac Newton, Hans Christian Andersen and Salvador Dali singing in a trio, whilst Karl Marx singing the bass to Emma Hamilton’s soprano.

In E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View, Mr Emerson remarks that getting through life is like ‘a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along’. The major attraction of the Dead is that the violin has been put back in its case, and their lives – however, short, discordant or tuneless – have a definite beginning, middle and an end. That is their chief advantage over those of us who are still trying to spot the tunes in our own compositions: we can see and hear the tune more clearly. We can understand the tune that the dead played in their lives; and, through that, learn more about them.

The original Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead were kind of early self-help manuals; the beginner’s guide to getting the best out of the afterlife. Anyone hoping for the same in the stories that will follow will be disappointed (as will those looking forward to ninety billion posts). Questions, not answers, are the big focus here; forging interesting connections rather than creating neat categories.

Above all, there’s nothing like hanging out with the Dead to point up the sheer improbability of being alive. As the late, great Maya Angelou reminded us: ‘Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: “I am with you kid. Let’s go.” ’