John Baker’s Blog

Dick Jones on Patteran Pages examines the changing role of the hero in our lives:
I don’t think I’ve ever had any actual heroes. However, when I was 5 or 6 Winston Churchill’s name still struck gold: we kids in playground & street accepted as an article of faith that he was the warrior-god who had [...]

A publisher’s reader examines her profession in The Guardian.
The reader’s report struggles to swim against this current but also has to take it into account. It’s a bit like being an admissions officer at the world’s most selective institution: even the Nobel prize for literature is no guarantee you’ll get in.
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Mr Eugenides and a whole [...]

It wasn’t an everyday event. Bodies weren’t. Altogether, not in this part of the country. You could be a serving officer for your whole life and not come into contact with a body. Maybe in London, Manchester, Birmingham, big cities. In those places you would have to deal with bodies, still not every day, but [...]

Sam Smith on Undernews has some pertinent observations about the so-called struggle against terrorism:
The journalist Bernard Fall noted that the French, after Dien Bien Phu, had no choice but to leave Southeast Asia. America, with its vast military, financial, and technological resources, was able to stay because it had the capacity to keep making the [...]