Novelist and biographer Nicholas Shakespeare has taken the bones of this little-known fragment of history and crafted it into a timely novella. Wisely, he doesn’t dwell on terror: he concentrates on his version of Gul and on a few characters in the days before the attack, and the mood he conveys is a tricky but largely successful mix of tender tragedy and humour.

A novella needs economy, and Shakespeare is deft: we know exactly how Rosalind Filwell feels about her young man when he touches her cheek ‘with a thick index finger, which has a crescent of dirt she cannot help observing’. The suspense arises from how the attack will destroy these people’s dreams, particularly the uneasy rapport between Rosalind and Gul, a clumsy ice cream seller about to turn martyr.

My only difficulty with Shakespeare’s vivid retelling is that I don’t understand how two victims of undeniably rampant racism and xenophobia can descend so abruptly from sullen resentment to an unshakeable determination to murder as many people as they can. But then today’s headlines can’t explain that either.