The final item in J. G. Ballard's volume of short stories, War fever, entitled 'The Index', offers an opportunity to reconstruct a missing volume from the surviving 'index without a book'. A page-long 'Editor's note' 'claims', 'the text printed below is the index to the unpublished and perhaps suppressed autobiography of... Henry Rhodes Hamilton'. It further speculates, 'Is the suppressed autobiography itself a disguised roman a clef, in which the fictional hero exposes the secret identities of his historical contemporaries?... Perhaps the entire compilation is nothing more than a figment of the overwrought imagination of some deranged lexicographer." ... Towards the end of the index, entries suggest the fate of the author and account for the provenance of the missing text ... And this strangest of indexes concludes with a fitting flourish ...