Such Delphic utterances were often misinterpreted. Monk tells us that one physicist thought he was referring to the slaughter of a legion of Theban soldiers for refusing to

fight Christians. But surely he was alluding to the plague that descends on Thebes for Oedipus’s crime.

From this vignette two threads emerge: Oppenheimer was often misunderstood— people wrote books and plays about him that simply got it wrong—but he may also have regarded himself, like Oedipus, as a tragic character. His Jewish antecedents he tended to ignore, steeping himself in Sanskrit or French literature and the classical world. He even said that the initial J. of his name stood for nothing, like the S. of Harry Truman—in fact, it stood for Julius. Yet unlike Oedipus, Oppenheimer was a reflective man of huge insight, knowledge and erudition. When asked by a magazine to “jot down—almost on impulse” up to ten books

“that most shaped your attitudes in your vocation and philosophy of life”, here is what he came up with:

Apart from Riemann, the Sanskrit author Bhartrhari and Faraday he omitted names of authors. They were to be understood, and the six different languages involved did not exhaust Oppenheimer’s repertoire. Before one trip he left a junior colleague to substitute for him in teaching a course, assuring him there was a book available. It was in Dutch. “But it’s very easy Dutch,” he said.