The most dreadful stories - the stories that live in the memory like scars, from Aberfan to Ariana Grande’s big night in Manchester – are ones where imagination comes first. You imagine yourself inside Grenfell Tower as the flames soar higher. It is the worst sort of nightmare, and it could be yours. This story starts with the same appalling image, the inferno, and compels a far wider sorrow and pity. Gradually, of course, the focus widens: in search of the men and the policies that fashioned this man-made disaster. But media coverage has felt the mood and the pain. Why, some critics ask, has it taken so long for death counts to begin to climb more realistically? Because in horrors we feel for ourselves there is no wish to push and heap on more pain, no bonus in being first with some very bad news.
