Midway through Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire (2003), the hero—and Aldred Leith is a hero in the oldest of the old-school sense—returns from Tokyo to his temporary home base outside Hiroshima.

Auden's 1939 string of elegies and farewellings – 'In Memory of W. B. Yeats', 'In Memory of Ernst Toller', 'September 1, 1939', and 'In Memory of Sigmund Freud' – contain some curiously discordant notes, as if there were some anarchic or nihilistic principle in them struggling against the ostensible protocol of solemnity.