It is to understand it so the UK can maximise its chances of thwarting it.
Where adventure stories used to depict a landscape alive with youngsters finding buried treasure, thwarting robbers and rounding up Nazi spies, the constraints on modern children mean authors must now invent whole fantastic worlds before their young heroes can enjoy any freedom.
Keeping us in the dark is not, apparently, about saving the government embarrassment but thwarting people smugglers and protecting asylum seekers from prying eyes.
That prospect has a good deal to do with privileged access to big money thwarting equality of opportunity, and the Clinton campaign's reported ambitions to spend an extraordinary $2bn persuading the people to embrace their woman only underlines the plutocratic threat to the world's proudest democracy.
Take the Vietnam war, the shadow that would hang over the 1960s, thwarting its attempts to be the decade of peace and love.
Elvis Costello refused to have any association with the Olympics, thwarting Boyle's plan to use the song Shipbuilding in the sequence on industrialisation.
Ian Bell, Warwickshire's top-order batsman, was imperious in his intent of thwarting Sussex's thoughts of a victory at Edgbaston Durham v Northamptonshire Northants give chase but Durham's Jamie Harrison hinders momentum.
Far from thwarting agreement, the atrocity in Delhi nudged Pakistan, in particular, into making the concessions needed to reach it.
But it reminds the reader of two things about cities. First, people have a habit of thwarting plans; one architect's urban park is another man's caravan site, or mattress dump.
Yet 100 days after Kosovo declared independence, Serbia has done a lot better than anybody expected in thwarting the EU's plans for it.Serbia still regards Kosovo as a province, but the ethnic Albanians, who constitute over 90% of its 2m people, declared its independence in February.
She did indeed hold the office in 2001-04 though she assumed it after the impeachment of her predecessor, and in both 2004 and 2009 was defeated in direct elections by Mr Yudhoyono.For all the Javanese deference Jokowi has bestowed on her, she may instinctively have regarded him as a usurping upstart, thwarting yet another tilt at the presidency.
