The War of the Worlds

Cylinders fall on the Surrey commons, and within a week the machines that climb out of them have emptied London of six million people. Wells wrote it while cycling around Woking, choosing real streets and stations for the destruction so that his neighbours could follow the invasion road by road. The Martians are beaten, but not by us — and the closing chapters, written before anyone knew what a germ could do to an army, are the coldest comfort in English fiction. Fifty-seven paintings by Turner, Constable and their contemporaries, from Whitby to Canny Glasgow, restore the English light and weather that the Martians cross to reach London.