If you describe a battle, you must ask yourself, at what point did it become possible to say that this side had won, and this side lost? Posterity gives out the prizes—sees who won the battle and who won the war. When you are situated in history, as we all are, you don’t hear the great drumroll of fate, but penny whistles and the banging of dustbin lids. Every great shift in human history happens on just another day—a Tuesday in July, as it may be, the sun coming out after Monday’s rain, the Paris streets filling up again, but a dozen things to delay you as you try to get across the river and, when you get there, the world-shaking event is over.

Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self-…, loc. 875