Reading this book is, in its own way, to take a ride on a time machine myself, for I first read The Time Machine many years ago, as a teenager. Re-reading it now, as when Proust ate a tea-soaked madeline cake, returned me to my own youth. And the first thing I realised was the way we approach time travel is a function of our age. As a teenager, if given a time machine, I, like the protagonist of Wells’ story, would unhesitatingly have set the dial to the future. After all, what’s past is done and dusted – who’s interested in the dead and gone?

Turns out, the answer is older me. Now, if sat upon the time machine, I would just as unhesitatingly turn the handle in the other direction and travel into the past, to my own younger self to give him a stern talking to, and further back, to the mysteries and wonders, to the origin rather than the end.

I remember the impact the unrelieved bleakness of Wells’ vision of the future had on me: the degenerate Morlock and Eloi were bad enough, but the final vision, of the failing earth under the dying sun, haunted me. What is all the stranger is that vision was promulgated by one of the most devoted apostles of human progress. In that, Wells’ art was greater than his philosophy.

Read it to contemplate the abyss of time when all there is, is time itself, and the slow death of all that is good.