Question 7: The extraordinary and original Sunday Times bestseller

by Richard Flanagan

Writers rail against misunderstanding, but poor writers prosper by being misunderstood, some even accidentally elevated into the pantheon of greatness in consequence, the bad clay of their work forever after glazed with the good fortune of brilliant readings.

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,

at the writing table, telling some more. Borges’s observation that Wells was interested in everything except the story he was writing was never truer than in what was to be published as The World Set Free.

He worried, he confided to Little e, that H. G. Wells was a mad man who thought he was H. G. Wells.

‘My God,’ the co-pilot Captain Robert Lewis said over the intercom, ‘what have we done?’, the meaning of which has been much debated ever since.

‘There was nothing but death in that cloud,’ the then twenty-four-year-old assistant engineer Robert Shumard commented many years later.

‘All those Japanese souls ascending to Heaven.’

exists.’ This definite and conclusive idea of an atomic bomb proved resonant. Slowly it took purchase on influential minds. One was Wells’s good friend Winston Churchill, who routinely read all Wells’s novels twice.

the burning ruins of Hiroshima. Mother, they kept saying as charred skin fell like long strands of kelp off their bodies and heads, mother.

Thomas Ferebee’s body was lit up like a neon tube, his body is lighting up like a neon tube, his body will always light up like a neon tube as until the end of all things the suffering of the dead illuminates the living. That’s life.

literature, perhaps even unsayable as literature? That the feeling standing next to a 13,000-year-old Huon pine on Mount Read made all of European literature look like the wild posturings of adolescents: so much juvenilia.

There is no memory without shame.

if aliens were so likely to exist given the infinite plenitude of planets, why had no compelling evidence ever been found in the universe for any form of higher life? Leo Szilard had the answer. ‘They are among us,’ he replied, ‘but they are called Hungarians.’

only write this book that you are now reading, no more than a love note to my parents and my island home, a world that has vanished, because over a century ago another writer wrote a book that decades later seized another mind with such force that it became a reality that reshaped the world.

London 1910–1939 (New York, 2007) and H. G. Wells’s H. G. Wells in Love: Postscript to an Experiment in Autobiography (London,

Rebecca West’s magnum opus, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon