Unpredictability
Unpredictability is the bane of economists, meteorologists, political pundits and sportswriters. They are always in danger of having their discredited forays into futurology flung back in their faces. Yet when reading a historical work it is all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that events could have taken only one path – that what happened must have happened. Writing with the advantage of hindsight, historians tend to depict an inexorable march of events leading up to the present.
