Graham Greene used to say that none of the great literary works he had read as an adult had the effect on him of The Viper of Milan, the ripping yarn he devoured as a child. Perhaps there is a deep truth in this. How many people who might savour the grandeurs, say, of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End or Henry James get the pure thrill of pleasure they got as children when they read the spellbinding stories of Robert Louis Stevenson? Remember the breathtaking magic of Treasure Island or the dazzling suspense and sparkle of Kidnapped: the sinister staircase and the still more sinister uncle and then rollicking bravura of the friendship with Alan Breck Stewart (memorably played by Peter Finch in the 1960 movie). Well, if Stevenson was a great writer he was, to be stringent about these things, a great trashmeister, a teller of tales, a scintillating entertainer. He was also, of course, a dazzling stylist and Ford Madox Ford growled in disfavour at the jewel-like beauty of his gleaming effects (though this is not an unheard of combination, those who cherish Raymond Chandler and all the droll charm of Philip Marlowe are responding to a quality of style).  Even so, it is boggling that when Stevenson died with his novel St. Ives uncompleted Arthur Quiller-Couch simply rolled up his sleeves and finished the book as if the brilliance of the great adventure writer’s style was something that could be duplicated. There used to be an abridged recording of Kidnapped by Douglas Fairbanks Jr, that matinee idol swordsman, which the poet and critic Chris Wallace Crabbe said was the favourite spoken-word recording for his family when they were travelling in their car. But there are many recordings of Stevenson that will lure and thrill the ear and the sometime poet laureate and Philip Larkin biographer Andrew Motion has written two successors to Treasure Island and high claims have been made for the pastiche he concocts.

Brooding about this led to the memory of Dylan Thomas’s version of Stevenson’s The Beach of Falesá which is a weird and haunting legacy to what Stevenson could do. In fact if you search for it you discover that in 2014 the BBC did a radio version of this in some ways sinister and distinctly haunting tale. It’s done by an ensemble of actors led by the Welsh actor Matthew Rhys – who played the gay brother in Brothers and Sisters with Sally Field and Rachel Griffiths –and it is done with great brio that makes you understand why Richard Burton was fascinated by Dylan Thomas’ ‘film for voices’ as it is billed.

Matthew Rhys gave a rather grand characterisation of Dylan Thomas in The Edge of Love, a film that also featured Sienna Miller as Caitlin Thomas and that almost impossibly good-looking actor, Cillian Murphy, who can be seen in cinemas at the moment in Oppenheimer. Robert Oppenheimer who oversaw the making of the atom bomb is an exemplary and extraordinary figure. He was not quite an Einstein – though Einstein warned Roosevelt of the danger of nuclear weapons in Hitler’s hands – but he was a practical rocket scientist of genius who knew how to build the bomb. He was also a man of exceptional general culture who could not only read Proust in French but the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit. He said of himself in his very beautiful voice, quoting the Hindu scripture, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’. Oppenheimer succeeded Einstein as the director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton and proceeded to invite the greatest poet of the day T.S. Eliot – a man who could also parse the connotations of Shanti and Shiva – to the great university. Though Oppenheimer was disappointed with the upshot: ‘All he produced was The Cocktail Party,’ the lord of falling worlds complained of the play in which Alec Guiness was the psychiatrist with a clairvoyant and empathetic sense of Eliot’s religious vision. It’s one of the grave ironies of modern history that Oppenheimer who wanted nothing to do with the hydrogen bomb should have been accused of un-American activities because of ancient associations with lefties. He was in fact a tragic patriot. iTunes will let you listen to Sir Alec performing Eliot’s not altogether neglible play.

And the world is full of words that can soothe and seduce the ear. Audible recently made free Roger Allam’s recording of Conrad’s Typhoon which is no simple adventure story, stylish or otherwise, but a great work of art, harrowing and spellbinding in the reality it conjures.

That must of necessity be true of the work of the great Cormac McCarthy who died a few weeks ago. It was strange to realise with the All the Pretty Horses trilogy how close his work seemed to the exhilarations of the remade Western, how exultant and popular and then – gradually, insistently – that we were in fact in the hands of a great artist. His death prompted Australian Book Review to make available a piece by your critic about The Road in the context of John Hillcoat’s 2009 film with Viggo Mortensen as the father and Australia’s Kodi Smit-McPhee in a staggering performance as the son with whom he treks a doomed earth populated by figures of horror – destroyers and cannibals, haters of the living and innocent. Hillcoat rises to the challenge of the sombre and ghastly power of Cormac McCarthy’s novel. And the vision of this all but terminal book is its own kind of footnote to the horrors of Hiroshima which Oppenheimer like the tragic servant of the God of Annihilation brought into the world.

A further work listened to and worth anyone’s attention is the free Audible recording of Nam Le reading his account of David Malouf written for the Black Inc. series in which a writer discusses a writer. Nam Le was a scholarship boy at Melbourne Grammar when he discovered David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon, the work that includes that famous remark in Australian history ‘I am a British object’ and Nam Le who produced the most formidable debut in recent literary memory, The Boat, with its dazzling collection of novellas found a guiding spirit in Malouf. This little book, crisply read by the author, has memorable details such as Le’s gasp of recognition when he learns that Malouf uses verse scansion, as he does himself, to write prose.