coronavirus pandemic presents all three. It has arrived out of the blue, driving whole nations into a state of paralysis, laying waste to the global economy, and carrying with it a panoply of dystopian threats and fears – the curtailing of civil liberties, involuntary quarantine and restrictions on movement.There is disagreement about exactly what the virus is, how it originated and how best to deal with it – affirming the screenwriter William Goldman’s maxim that ‘nobody knows anything’.If ever there was a time when certainty was needed, it is now.