Robert Everett-Green was looking forward to John Adams’s operatic take on the Manhattan Project, Doctor Atomic. But he came away from the experience confused. “Why, I wondered (as [Tom] Wolfe did a decade ago about American fiction), is there so much free-floating introspection and soul-searching in this thing? With such a big story at hand – the first successful atomic detonation and the start of the nuclear age – why not just get on with telling it?”