It was the late Max Bygraves who used to say, “I wanna tell you a story”. These days everyone has a story to tell – individuals, institutions, businesses, political parties – but the word they often prefer is “narrative”. A “narrative” is a chronological account of events. Originally, starting in the fifteenth century, the word for that was “narration” but that later took on a narrower, more technical sense: the telling of a story rather than the story itself – or the voice-over in a film. It came from the Latin gnarus, an adjective meaning “knowledgeable” or “expert”, which also gave us the word “ignorant”. “Narrative” had the same ultimate source, but it began as a technica