In the run-up to the centenary of the disaster in 2012, I published a non-fiction book, Shadow of the Titanic, which investigated the origins of our continuing obsession, as well as how the experience of the sinking shaped the lives of the survivors.
The feeding frenzy started early. In May 1912, just a month after the tragedy, one of the survivors, the Hollywood actor Dorothy Gibson, starred in Saved from the Titanic, a silent film that could be said to be one of the world's first exploitation movies. Audiences were promised the extra thrill of seeing Gibson wearing the same dress she had worn that fateful night.
Over the course of the century the story of the Titanic ebbed and flowed through culture and the popular imagination. In June 1912, Thomas Hardy published his poem The Convergence of the Twain: "And as the smart ship grew/ In statue, grace and hue,/ In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too."
The demand for all things Titanic proved almost insatiable - in 1912 alone there were 112 different pieces of music inspired by the shipwreck copyrighted in the US.
The horrors of the first and then the second world wars threatened to erase the disaster from the collective consciousness, but the Titanic refused to fade away.
Indeed, George Orwell, writing in his 1940 essay My Country Right or Left, confessed how the disaster continued to haunt him. "If I honestly sort out my memories and disregard what I have learned since, I must admit that nothing in the whole war moved me so deeply as the loss of the Titanic had done a few years earlier."
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