Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.

Human situations repeat in different costumes. Power rises, grows confident, overreaches and falls, and the pattern is regular enough that studying what happened before is a reasonable way of guessing what comes next. It does something quieter too, placing your own moment in a long line rather than at the centre of history.

When a current crisis feels unprecedented, go looking for the older version of it. Something similar has happened to a company, a country or a family already. Knowing how those went is not a forecast, but it beats reacting as though nothing like this has occurred.