Harry Truman

At 8.15 a.m. on 6 August 1945, a B-29 bomber called Enola Gay dropped ‘Little Boy’ over Hiroshima. The thermal radiation from the atom bomb was 900 times more searing than the sun. An estimated 118,661 civilians died, horribly. Survivors staggered about with their skin in shreds, their intestines hanging out and their blacked and bleeding faces grotesquely disfigured. Upon hearing the news, President Harry Truman called the bombing ‘the greatest thing in history’. Why the US unleashed the terrible bombs over Hiroshima, and three days later over Nagasaki, has been much debated ever since. In his excellent short book on the subject, Richard Overy writes: The question asked is

This is a book like no other. Part artwork and part compendium of a lifetime’s experience in design, it is meant to be looked at as much as read. Nor is it titled Colourful for nothing: entire pages are in vivid hues of vermilion, lime green, canary yellow, emerald and toffee. On them are displayed illustrations, patterns of fabric and family photographs, interspersed with chunks of prose or aphorisms. In short, it is an expression of its author’s philosophy, threaded through rather disjointedly with the story of her life. Iris Apfel is the only woman I can think of – with the possible exceptions of Diana Vreeland and Helena Rubinstein