Time & Perspective Quote by Helen Dunmore

Dunmore’s line is a quiet provocation disguised as common sense: history isn’t a museum, it’s a set of lenses. The phrasing matters. “If” keeps it conditional, almost wary, as if she’s acknowledging how often we don’t understand the past so much as curate it into comforting myths. And “more likely” refuses the tidy promise that knowledge automatically produces wisdom. She’s not selling history as a moral vaccine; she’s describing it as a probability shift. That modesty is the telltale voice of a poet, suspicious of grand claims and alert to how easily language turns into propaganda.

The subtext is about pattern-recognition and power. “Recognise what is happening around us” implies that the present often arrives disguised. Crises repeat with different costumes: scapegoating gets rebranded as “security,” censorship as “protection,” inequality as “merit.” Without the past, we misread signals and accept rehearsed narratives as unprecedented emergencies. With it, we notice the script.

Contextually, Dunmore wrote across fiction and poetry with a strong historical consciousness (and, in her later work, a clear anxiety about contemporary politics). The line reads like an argument for civic attention: memory as a public utility, not a private hobby. It’s also a warning about forgetting as an active process. Societies don’t just lose history; they shed it when it becomes inconvenient. Her sentence pushes back, insisting that the past is not behind us so much as underneath us, still bearing weight.