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‘The rings of Saturn consist of ice crystals and probably meteoric particles describing circular orbits around the
planet’s equator. In all likelihood these are fragments of a former moon that was too close to the planet and was destroyed by its tidal effect’. Epigraph, from the Brockhaus Encyclopedia, in W G Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, 1995 (english trans. 1998).

Sebald’s text, ostensibly a kind of travelogue of the narrator’s walk on the Suffolk coast, is an extraordinary weaving and juxtaposition of fragments of memory and the remains of former events (often hugely destructive). It is as …