When your number’s up: fatality lurks in unexpected places

LIFE is risky, as the family of Michael Schumacher knows. The seven-time Formula One champion is in hospital in Grenoble, with critical head injuries, after a skiing accident in the French Alps.

Sex is dangerous. One in 45 heart attacks occurs during it. Errol Flynn, Nelson Rockefeller and the late-19th century French president, Félix Faure, are all believed to have died while in flagrante. The actor Peter Sellers survived a heart attack while in bed with his second wife, Britt Ekland. Recovering in hospital, he supposedly told a friend: “I didn’t know whether I was coming or going.”

There can be no accounting for luck. “Risk and danger and chance are clashes of perspective,” says Michael Blastland, co-author of The Norm Chronicles: Stories and Numbers about Danger. “They don’t exist objectively. You can’t find them out there in the world, as some independently objective description of what’s going to happen to people.