We think of our own crisis as pre-eminent, more worrying, more interesting than other crises…. It is commonplace to talk about our historical situation as uniquely terrible and in a way privileged, a cardinal point in time. But can it really be so? It seems doubtful that our crisis…is one of the important differences between us and our predecessors. Many of them felt as we do. If the evidence looks good to us, so it did to them.

Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending:
Studies in the History of Fiction