"Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past."

Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft, p 43

Marc Bloch, a French historian who died in the Holocaust, was not the first to think that our current dilemmas could be sited in a wilful refusal to pay attention to history. Bloch would have understood only too well that the Nazis who ended his life were manufacturers of a false history that gave expression to the awful present they had created.

At the moment, commentators of all stripes are exercised by the unprecedented nature of Covid 19. Unprecedented is a word that is much in use, but is it true that the coronavirus is a contagion without precedent?

Well, no, of course not. In the last 120 years we have had the Spanish Flu, HIV Aids, Sars and Ebola. In the centuries before we had The Black Death, a scourge that made a number of reappearances, the last as late as the 19th Century in China. History records many others, such as the Justinian and Antonine Plagues during the time of the Roman Empire.

So what is the point of studying the past? Surely this, that if we know about the struggles of those who have lived before, how they felt about lives, their fears, hopes and troubles, we can put our own lives and times in a fuller perspective. Perspective gives us pause for breath and thought, it may even lead to wisdom. At the very least, we will know that the sky is not falling down.