“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”

I come from the generation that finds it physically impossible to read that opening paragraph without hearing Richard Burton’s magnificent voice, providing the narration for Jeff Wayne’s album.

I really enjoyed ‘War of the Worlds’. I can’t imagine you don’t know the basic premise, but just in case, here goes: aliens attack Woking, and thence Southern England. Not so much war of the worlds therefore as Martians vs the Home Counties. And of course ‘we’ win, in a way that had allowed Europeans to win so many earlier colonial wars.