Fictional history

Ruth Brandon’s entertaining novel Tickling the Dragon Jonathan Cape, £14.99, ISBN 0 224 04104 5) is set in the forcedly expatriate Hungarian community of physicists and mathematicians who fled west in advance of the Nazis. Fiction offers a way to explore the troubled history of Robert Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project, and Brandon confronts head-on the notion of loyalty and treachery, and their effects on a family shattered by the death of a nuclear physicist.