Why, as the Great War recedes further into the past, does it loom larger?

Another Remembrance Day approaches as I write. Another autumnal Sunday; another Last Post; those poppies again; in Derbyshire the church parades; another nationwide two-minute silence. The occasion always sets me thinking about what people call ‘perspective’ in history.

Sir Percy Cradock, leaving Peking as ambassador nearly 30 years ago, said something about history’s rear-view mirror in his valedictory despatch: ‘In the socialist state,’ he wrote, ‘it is the past that is unpredictable.’

And not just in the socialist state. The longer one lives the more the past appears as a landscape in perpetual, usually gradual, sometimes radical upheaval. As each succeeding generation gets its recent history into what we like to call perspective, the mountain ranges in our wing mirrors heave, warp and morph, often almost out of recognition.