Year's End

And so ends 2014. As is customary at this time of the year, there have been a lot of retrospectives on the past twelve months - many of them with a touch of obligation to them, as if we'd rather not look back at all, but since the new year is coming up and everyone expects it...

History, of course, operates on timeframes both longer and shorter than a single calendar year, and this, perhaps, contributes to a feeling that looking back on everything at the end-of-year is arbitrary and perfunctory. It's become a cliché to say that, compared to today, that the world will be both exactly the same and profoundly different tomorrow, but no matter how many times people say it, we never seem to take the lesson of it to heart - any time is a good time to understand what has gone before.