My A to Z of scare stories, from Anthrax to Zion (Protocols of the Elders of)

Matthew Parris provides an A to Z of things that at one point scared us rigid but the dangers of which now appear to have been greatly exaggerated. 

Britain, says the poet Kate Fox, quoted on Radio 4’s Saturday Live last week, is a country ‘eternally poised between a hosepipe ban and a flood’. Or between fearsome, knife-wielding youth gangs and a teen generation of obese couch-potatoes. Knife crime is a horrible thing; and for offering the list of comparable scares which follows you may call me flippant. But in every case it was for a while true that what would have been thought flippant would have been to question the scale of each threat.

My friend Simon Briscoe has co-written an entire book (Panicology — Penguin-Viking) about the statistical basis of panic; I, less systematically, have spent three hours on a train with a ballpoint pen, a paper place mat, and my own recollections.